If two New Hampshire men aren't a match for the Devil, we might as well give the country back to the Indians. -Stephen Vincent Benet (1898-1943)
Elon Musk’s DOGE Was Far More of a Dismal Failure Than We Thought (Frank Landymore, 8/13/25, Futurism)
A new investigation by Politico found that of the $52.8 billion that DOGE claims it’s saved by cancelling federal contracts through July, its actual savings were closer to a paltry $1.4 billion — which is barely two percent of what it’s boasting to the public.
Always bet on the Deep State.
U.S. Drinking Rate at New Low as Alcohol Concerns Surge (Lydia Saad, 8/13/25, Gallup)
The percentage of U.S. adults who say they consume alcohol has fallen to 54%, the lowest by one percentage point in Gallup’s nearly 90-year trend. This coincides with a growing belief among Americans that moderate alcohol consumption is bad for one’s health, now the majority view for the first time.
Thanks to Milei, Argentina adds 7.7 million people to the middle class in one year (La Derecha Diario, 06/08/2025)
According to data from the consulting firm LCG based on the Permanent Household Survey (EPH) by INDEC, the middle class went from representing 23% of the population at the beginning of 2024 to reaching 39% in the first quarter of 2025. This is equivalent to 7.7 million people who managed to improve their family income and leave the vulnerability zone.
What if History Died by Sanctioned Ignorance? (David W. Blight, August 7, 2025, New Republic)
In Richard J. Evans’s trilogy on the Third Reich, he shows indelibly how the Nazis achieved power because of eight key factors: One, the depth of economic depression and the ways it radicalized the electorate; two, widespread hatred for parliamentary democracy that had taken root for at least a decade all over Europe; three, the destruction of dissent and academic freedom in universities; four, the Nazis’ ritualistic “dynamism,” charisma, and propaganda machinery; five, the creation of a cloak of legality around so many of their tactics, stage by stage of the descent into fear, terror, and autocracy; six, the public manipulating and recrafting of history and forging Nazi mythology to fit their present purposes; seven, they knew whom and what they viscerally hated—communists and Jews—and made them the objects of insatiable grievance; eight, and finally, vicious street violence, with brownshirts in cities and student thugs on college campuses, mass arrests, detainment camps, and the Gestapo in nearly every town. All of these methods, mixed with the hideous dream of an Aryan racial utopia and a nationalism rooted in deep resentment of the Versailles Treaty at the end of World War I, provided the Nazis the tools of tyranny.
In 2025, our own autocratic governing party has already employed many, though not all, of these techniques. Thanks to a free press and many courts sustaining the rule of law, Trumpism has not yet mastered every authoritarian method. But it has launched a startlingly rapid and effective beginning to an inchoate American brand of fascism.
Ideology and realty are incompatrible, which is why Left and Right war against history, economics, biology, etc..
From Russian Interference to Revisionist Innuendo: What the Gabbard Files Actually Say (Renee DiResta, August 6, 2025, Lawfare)
Russia interfered in the 2016 election in three distinct ways: First, the Internet Research Agency (IRA), also known as the “troll factory,” ran a disinformation campaign using fake social media accounts with content that reached more than 100 million people. The propaganda content surrounding the election aimed to depress the Black and liberal vote on the left, while promoting Trump on the right. During the Republican primary, following a brief effort to boost Rand Paul, they pivoted to Trump, denigrating primary opponents such as Sens. Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz. Contrary to the talking point that it was just “$150k in Facebook ads,” the IRA’s broader influence campaign cost around $10 million per year. It ultimately became the subject of a Department of Justice indictment against the IRA, its parent company, and individual operatives.
Second, throughout 2015 and 2016, the Russian military intelligence agency the GRU hacked targets including the Democratic National Committee (DNC), the Clinton campaign, Open Society Foundations, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and other think tanks seen as promoting liberal internationalism. Russian military intelligence then selectively leaked the hacked material, usually with the intent of embarrassing the target at a strategic time. For example, the first tranche of thousands of Clinton campaign manager John Podesta’s documents were dumped by WikiLeaks approximately an hour after the release of the Access Hollywood “Grab ‘Em By the Pussy” tape on Oct. 7, 2016. (Roger Stone was apparently in contact with the hackers’ Guccifer persona about the releases.) The Podesta emails had staying power; they would become the foundation of the Pizzagate conspiracy theory.
Third, Russian cyber actors, likely also the GRU, targeted election infrastructure by attempting to hack machines and databases concerned with voter rolls in states and jurisdictions across the United States (some reports say all 50 states were targeted). No votes were changed and no voter information was altered.
These activities were summarized in the Jan. 6, 2017, Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA), which described the interference as a multifaceted influence campaign ordered by Russian President Vladimir Putin to undermine faith in the democratic process and damage Clinton’s candidacy. The assessment noted that Putin and the Russian government developed a “clear preference for President-elect Trump.” It made these assessments with high confidence. It also assessed that Russia had “aspired to help” Trump’s chances at victory.
AI Is Radically Democratizing Legal Services (Jack Nicastro and Samuel Crombie, 8/05/25, Fusion)
Artificial intelligence (AI) promises to leave no corner of American society unaltered, and the legal system is no exception. Dr. Bateman believes AI will birth an inequitable and disorderly justice system. On the contrary, we believe AI is positioned to be an ultimate equalizer of justice.AI is cheap and fast intelligence; intelligence facilitates truth-seeking, and it is truth-seeking that is the primary function of our courts. Bateman fears that AI adoption will be an ultimatum for the rule of law, or an epistemic weapon of mass destruction. We believe it is functionally identical to previous technologies adopted by courts to improve the truth-seeking process. AI is a broad term for a broad set of technologies. U.S. courts are similarly decentralized in structure and diverse in function. Through his piece, Bateman conflates distinct parts of the justice system (impact statements, evidence rules, representation) and distinct AI technologies (chatbots, deepfakes, audio cloning) with one another. In our response, we clarify the different forms of courtroom AI and consider the unique operating procedures and rules of different parts of the legal system. In explaining how AI could be used and in what contexts, we challenge his assertions that it will weaken the foundations of our justice system. Bateman envisages a world where legal criterion and judicial precedent evaporates, while agents of the court cease to operate rationally. Through the examples he offers, Bateman fundamentally misinterprets the court’s present frustrations, e.g., a victim impact statement made with prejudice, an unlicensed attorney practicing law, the introduction of falsified evidence, &c., as essential to AI. They are not. We confront his conclusion that AI is outpacing prudence and reach the conclusion that it is luddism that is imprudent. AI is nothing more than a tool. An auditable, increasingly interpretable, unprecedentedly powerful tool for ascertaining and evaluating the truth. Judges, juries, public defenders, court clerks, self-representing defendants, expert witnesses, and mediators all stand to benefit from AI.
3D printing set to slash nuclear plant build times & costs (David Szondy, August 04, 2025, New Atlas)
As part of the Generation IV Hermes Low-Power Demonstration Reactor project being built at the Oak Ridge campus in Tennessee in partnership with Kairos Power, MDF is testing the use of 3D-printed polymer forms to build the thick concrete bioshield used to contain the reactor vessel and isolate it from the outside environment. These forms are assembled around networks of steel rebar and concrete then poured into the mold.
According to Oak Ridge, the new polymer forms are fast to produce and can be reused as required. In addition, they are more precise than conventional steel or wooden molds, can be configured into complex shapes, and allow for more precise formations. This allows complex structures to be assembled onsite in a matter of days rather than weeks. In addition, reusable polymer molds can reduce the amount of timber needed for plant construction by 75%.
Always fun when the Luddites tell you AI or renewable energy has been transformative…yet.
US Appeals Court Indicates It Might Declare Trump’s Birthright Citizenship Order Unconstitutional (Reuters The Guardian, 8/03/25)
The San Francisco-based ninth US circuit court of appeals last week became the first federal appeals court to hold Trump’s order as unconstitutional. Its ultimate fate will probably be determined by the supreme court.Eric McArthur, a justice department attorney, said on Friday that the citizenship clause of the US constitution’s 14th amendment, which was ratified in 1868 after the US civil war, rightly extended citizenship to the children of newly freed enslaved Black people.
“It did not extend birthright citizenship as a matter of constitutional right” to the children of people in the US without documentation, he said.
But the judges questioned how that argument was consistent with the supreme court’s 1898 ruling interpreting the clause in United States v Wong Kim Ark, long understood as guaranteeing American citizenship to children born in the US to non-citizen parents.
Birthright citizenship is Originalism.
Melville’s Bartleby: The Great-Great-Grandfather of the Quiet Quitters of Today’s Gen Z: Herman Melville’s “Bartleby the Scrivener” had It right: Why forcing workers back to the office misses the point. (Stephan Richter, 8/02/25, The Globalist)
Corporations across the globe are currently doubling down on “return to office” mandates. They are keen on summoning their employees back into their cubicles and open-plan watercooler chatter.And yet, one wonders: What exactly are they being called back to? The promise of collaboration? The lure of higher productivity? Or is it something more profane — a claim of presence meant to boost executives and assure them that corporate control has not slipped?
Why rabbits?: Towards a better, floofier world. (Noah Smith, Jun 18, 2023, Noahpinion)
A number of my blog readers have been asking me to lay out my broad moral framework. Usually I resist this impulse. As David Hume wrote, humans decide on right and wrong based on a confusing and often mutually contradictory jumble of moral instincts, and attempts to fit those instincts into a rigid, internally consistent moral code are generally an exercise in futility. But if I do have one consistent, bedrock principle about the way the world ought to work, it’s this — the strong should protect and uplift the weak.
Nature endows some people with strength — sharp claws, size and musculature, resistance to disease. Human society endows us with other forms of strength that are often far more potent — guns, money, social status, police forces and armies at our backs. Everywhere there is the temptation for those with power to crush those without it, to enslave them, to extract labor and fealty and fawning flattery. “The strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must,” wrote Thucydides; this is as concise a statement as you’ll ever find of the law of the jungle, both the real jungle and the artificial jungles humans create for ourselves. A hierarchy of power and brutality is a high-entropy state, an easy equilibrium toward which social interactions naturally flow.
I believe that it is incumbent upon us as thinking, feeling beings — it is our moral purpose and our mission in this world — to resist this natural flow, to stand against it, to reverse it where possible. In addition to our natural endowments of power, we must gather to ourselves what additional power we can, and use it to protect and uplift those who have less of it. To some, that means helping the poor; to others, fighting for democracy or civil rights; to others, it simply means taking good care of their kids, or of a pet rabbit. But always, it means rolling the stone uphill, opposing the natural hierarchies of the world, fighting to reify an imaginary world where the strong exercise no dominion over the weak.
We will never fully realize that world, of course. And my morality is easier to declare than to put into practice; on the way we will make many missteps. We will make mistakes about who is strong and who is weak, punching down when we self-righteously tell ourselves we’re punching up. Like the communists of the 20th century, we will sometimes invert one unjust hierarchy only to put another in its place. And we will be corrupted by the power we gather, mouthing high principle while exploiting some of those we claim to protect; we will tell ourselves that we’re knights while acting like barbarians (just as actually existing knights often did).
All these things will happen, and yet it is incumbent upon us to do the best we can, to keep fighting the good fight for a gentler, more equal world.