America and China in the World, a quick note

Is that where we’re headed, to a bipolar world dominated by America and China? I just asked Google Search: “Is China the largest economy in the world?” Its reply:

China is the world's largest economy when measured by Purchasing Power Parity (PPP), but the United States is the largest in terms of nominal Gross Domestic Product (GDP).

• By Purchasing Power Parity (PPP): China is the world's largest economy, with an estimated output exceeding $44 trillion. This metric adjusts for the cost of living and the price of local goods, reflecting a higher real volume of economic activity.
  
• By Nominal GDP: The United States holds the top spot. In current market exchange rates, the U.S. economy is valued at approximately $32 trillion, while China's nominal GDP is roughly $20 trillion.

So that’s one thing. The other is AI. America and China are in a race for dominance in AI. America has a technical lead, but with respect to Frontier LLMs, that lead is measured in months, not years. And China is making its models open weight while the most advanced American models (Anthropic, OpenAI, Google) and not open. It’s not at all clear how that will shake out.

With the Trump administration authoritarianism is on the rise in America. While the Democrats may well win the next presidential election, it’s not at all clear what that means for America’s already precarious democracy. The problem is that a great deal of power is concentrated in the hands of political and business elites, so much that America’s democracy looks like a chess game played by oligarchs where ordinary Americans are the pawns.

Is that what the world will become in 2040, a competition between American and Chinese oligarchs in which everyone else is a pawn, with Homo economicus triumphant over all?

Can the USofA Hold On? [the MAGA way, the way of the dodo]

Nicholas Kristof, Can the United States Hold On? NYTimes, July 8, 2026.

Kaifeng is today a sleepy Chinese city on the Yellow River, but a millennium ago it was probably the most important place in the world. It was then China’s capital and was crowded with a population of about one million. (London’s population was then about 15,000.)

Other contenders for global leadership in the year 1000 were the Byzantine Empire based in Constantinople, the Abbasid caliphate based in Baghdad and the Ghaznavid Empire in West Asia, headquartered in what is now Ghazni, Afghanistan. None were able to adapt and preserve themselves.

So I wonder: Can the United States hold on? Will the United States still be vibrant on our 500th birthday? Or will we go the way of Byzantium and the Abbasids?

We're slipping on our three-pronged path to prosperity:

....heavy investments in human capital such as education. The United States was a world leader in mass education in the 19th and 20th centuries, but we now rank ninth in reading, 16th in science and 34th in math, according to the PISA global ranking of student test scores.

Human capital is also about our health and well-being, and that likewise is discouraging: The United States now ranks 61st in life expectancy globally, according to the World Bank.

A second prong of America’s growth path was the welcome we (inconsistently and imperfectly) at times offered immigrants. [...]

The third element of America’s growth formula — a reliance on free markets — remains largely intact, at least by international standards. But inequality appears to have soared since 1980, and there’s evidence that while some inequality is necessary for growth, too much dampens it. The dollar remains overwhelmingly the world’s currency but has weakened, and its supremacy is being challenged at the edges. [...]

True, our animating ideas — of equality, of opportunity, of openness to immigration — were in part rhetorical flourishes, for they don’t explain Jim Crow, the Chinese Exclusion Acts or tight curbs on Jewish immigration. But these ideas were aspirational, and over the centuries they inspired real progress. Now I fear we’ve retreated even from the aspirations.

Losers:

As I see it, we’ve lost two wars in the past half-dozen years — one against the Afghan Taliban and one against Iran just this year — not to mention last year losing a trade war with China. We may be retreating from NATO and from efforts to buttress Taiwan.

Our position — divided at home and weakening abroad — is reminiscent of the decline of great powers in the past, not just the Abbasids and Ghaznavids but also Spain in 1588 and Britain in the late 19th century.

Optimists:

My very guarded optimism about America’s long-run prospects is based on three factors:

First, we appear to have maintained an edge (partly by importing scientists) in technology, which since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution has been a driver of progress and global leadership. Then it was the steam engine and spinning jenny. Now it is artificial intelligence, materials science and biotechnology. And our technological sophistication pairs well with the world’s deepest financial markets, with American stocks accounting for roughly two-thirds of global stock value, compared with less than 30 percent in 1988.

Second, other nations have their own problems. Our principal competitor for now is China, which has enormous strengths but also is aging fast and declining in population and is led by an aging dictator.

Third, prophecies of American decline are nothing new. [...]

So I don’t believe that our decline is inevitable.

There's more at the link.

The South Dakota Symphony and the Lakota Music Project

Joseph Horowitz, At 250, Has America Delivered on Its Classical Music Promise? NYTimes, July 4, 2026.

The article is a general review of classical music in America starting with Henry Lee Higginson and the Boston Symphony. It's interesting throughout, but I want to present a single excerpt, from the end.

In the Midwest, the South Dakota Symphony Orchestra (for which, full disclosure, I serve as scholar in residence) likewise fulfills the credo pronounced long ago by Theodore Thomas when he crusaded for symphonic music across the United States: “A symphony orchestra shows the culture of the community, not opera.”

In fact, the concert orchestra, to a remarkable degree, proved an American invention — a civic hub comparable to the opera house abroad. The South Dakota Symphony enjoys a music director, Delta David Gier, who moved to Sioux Falls 22 years ago and has raised a family there. Gier has at all times insisted that an orchestra aspire to serve a specific community in specific ways. His signature initiative is the Lakota Music Project, which binds the orchestra to Native American reservations throughout the state. Beyond that, all the proposals now controversial in Boston, including thematic festivals and “affinity programing,” have already been implemented in Sioux Falls.

Do the South Dakota Symphony musicians, in Eagle Hawk’s words, “feel it”? The orchestra maintains a nine-member, full-time core consisting of a string quartet and wind quintet, both self-governing. They perform more than 100 times per season. At the Pine Ridge or Rosebud reservations, they play with Lakota drummers and singers, and mentor young musical aspirants. The remainder of the orchestra’s members, many of whom come from the Twin Cities area of Minnesota, are self-selecting: They do not trek to Sioux Falls for the income, but are enticed by the repertoire, which is brave, and the vibe, which is exhilarating.

The history of the Lakota Music Project tracks the South Dakota Symphony’s larger trajectory. It is an exercise in building trust and mutual understanding. Early on, the symphony members and the Porcupine Singers would play for each other. Personal and musical relationships evolved. Then there were fledgling attempts to make music together. The most recent Lakota Music Project tour, last October, premiered two compositions: one by Jeffrey Paul, the orchestra’s extraordinary principal oboist, and one by Bermel, with whom I conferred about those Met Opera broadcasts. The performers included symphony musicians alongside Pine Ridge’s Creekside Singers and the Dakota flutist Bryan Akipa.

In both pieces, elements of Native American and Western classical music merged triumphantly. Bermel has recast his composition to include the entire South Dakota Symphony; it premieres in November as part of a two-week festival considering “Native American inspirations” in classical music, beginning with Dvorak’s “New World” Symphony (accompanied by visuals exploring his indebtedness to Longfellow’s “The Song of Hiawatha”). Given the intellectual heft of this exercise, tracking the “Indianist” movement Dvorak inspired and its more recent aftermath, the festival will reach beyond the concert hall not only to local high schools, but to classrooms and concerts at four universities in four South Dakota cities.

Why do American's fear AI, but many other countries don't? [Homo economicus strikes again!]

Paul Kedrosky, There’s One Clear Reason Why Americans Are Gloomy About A.I., NYTimes, June 25, 2026.

Hating artificial intelligence may be the only thing about which Americans agree. But they are global outliers in their pessimism. A survey of 24,000 adults across 30 countries found that citizens of nearly all of those countries, rich or poor, see A.I. more favorably than Americans do. This is startling for citizens of a wealthy, advanced economy who are usually enthusiastic tech adopters of anything with a wall charger. [...]

Why isn’t it working? Because the theory is incomplete, at best. If American A.I. pessimism were merely cultural or informational, it would correlate with media consumption, education levels or political polarization. Instead, it cuts across all those categories. It correlates instead with labor market institutions.

Start with the global picture. Plot A.I. sentiment against income and labor market, and there is a pattern. Poorer countries are A.I. optimistic: Indonesia at 76 percent, Thailand at 77 percent and Mexico at 63 percent. Rich countries like the United States, the Netherlands and Belgium are not. What A.I. means depends, in large part, on where you sit economically.

In countries with largely informal economies — where large numbers of people work without contracts, benefits or legal protections — A.I. looks like a ladder to better economic outcomes previously available only to those with capital, education and formal employment. A small manufacturer in Guadalajara or a street vendor in Jakarta doesn’t have much to lose from A.I. disruption, and potentially a great deal to gain.

In rich countries with more formal labor markets, however, A.I. looks more like an ambush. It threatens what people already have: stable employment, predictable income and accumulated professional standing. [...]

But not all wealthy nations feel the same. Norway is more optimistic than France, and Germany more than Canada. Those countries have broadly similar income levels, so income alone doesn’t explain the variation.

So what does? In Norway, losing your job means receiving around 67 percent of your previous wages in unemployment benefits while you search for the next position. In France, it’s around 66 percent, and 60 percent in Germany. The insurance system treats unemployment as a temporary inconvenience and bridges you smoothly across.

The United States pays significantly less in unemployment benefits than many European countries do. [...]

There's more at the link.

America and China have different attitudes about and approaches to AI and work

Ross Douthat, Why China Isn’t Worried A.I. Will Replace Its Workers, NYTimes, May 14, 2026.

The United States and China are really the only two countries that matter right now in shaping the A.I. future. As President Trump and President Xi Jinping meet in Beijing, there’s a kind of Cold War atmosphere, with people talking about an A.I. arms race. But who is winning? Are we even in a race at all? Kyle Chan, a foreign policy fellow at the Brookings Institution, says it’s hard to call it a race because the U.S. and China have very different A.I. goals.

I presented the conversation to Claude (Sonnet 4.6 Adaptive) and asked it for a summary. 

 * * * * *

I have uploaded conversation to the project area, filename “China AI workers.”

It is between Ross Douthat, who writes for The New York Times, and Kyle Chan, who is a foreign policy fellow at the Brookings Institution. I would like you to summarize the conversation for me. I’m particularly interested in the Chinese attitude toward AI in general and the (proper) relationship between AI and humans.

This is a rich and wide-ranging conversation. Here's a summary, with particular attention to the themes you flagged.

Overall frame

Douthat's central premise is that the U.S. and China are in an AI "arms race," but Chan's main contribution is to complicate and largely deflate that framing. China, he argues, is running a different kind of race, not the same race at a slower pace.

The Chinese approach to AI: practical, not transcendent

The sharpest contrast Chan draws is between the American fixation on AGI — the idea of a "machine god" that surpasses all human capability — and the Chinese orientation toward diffusion and application. China wants AI in food delivery, ride-hailing, health care, government services, and factory floors. They want smaller, cheaper, more deployable models, not necessarily the most powerful frontier model. Chan puts it directly: Beijing is not "AGI-pilled."

He sees this as continuous with how China approached the internet era: not as a transformative metaphysical event, but as infrastructure to be integrated into daily life and governance. The Chinese state is also notably more willing to use open-source models, giving away AI capabilities to gain adoption at scale — both domestically and in the Global South — which is a strategy the commercially driven American labs largely ignore.

The proper relationship between AI and humans: tool, not god

This is where the conversation is most relevant to your homo ludens framework. Chan describes Beijing's view of AI as essentially instrumental — AI serves human economic and social purposes. The Chinese government is actively hostile to AI use that it considers "nonproductive": AI companions, AI boyfriends/girlfriends, even excessive gaming. The fear is that young Chinese will waste time on AI-mediated entertainment and social substitution when they should be building the economy.

There's a revealing parallel Chan draws: the same regulatory instinct that cracked down on video games and private tutoring platforms is now being pointed at AI companionship apps. The state's implicit position is that AI must serve the collective project — not become a substitute for human connection, productivity, or reproduction. This is a deeply anti-mystical, anti-transcendent view of the technology.

So the Chinese "proper relationship" between AI and humans is essentially: AI augments human labor, fills demographic gaps (falling birthrate, shrinking workforce), and extends state capacity. It does not replace human flourishing or social life; it should not become an end in itself.

The demographic driver

Chan adds an important materialist dimension: China's embrace of robotics and AI is partly driven by sheer demographic necessity. Their labor force peaked over a decade ago, youth unemployment is near 17%, and the birthrate is roughly two-thirds the U.S. rate. This produces a different calculus than in America — the question isn't whether a robot waiter displaces a human worker, but whether you have a waiter at all. AI and robotics fill a structural labor hole, which makes China more tolerant of automation than Western economies that still have more human workers to protect.

The public mood: anxiety about falling behind, not about being displaced

Where American anxiety about AI tends toward fears of job loss, surveillance, or existential catastrophe, Chan describes Chinese popular anxiety as nearly the inverse: fear of not using AI enough, of being left behind in a hyper-competitive labor market. Individual workers, companies, and policymakers all share this orientation. Chan calls this a "mirroring" — the individual's fear of losing competitive edge mirrors China's national fear of falling behind the U.S. technologically.

On AGI and existential risk: skeptical distance

Chan thinks it's telling that when Trump relaxed chip export controls, Chinese AI companies wanted the chips but Beijing declined — preferring to build domestic semiconductor capacity rather than become dependent on American supply chains. This, he argues, is not the behavior of a country sprinting toward superintelligence. A true AGI race would involve gobbling up every available chip. China is playing a longer, more measured game.

He also pushes back gently on the "race" metaphor itself: the intermediate risks (cyberwarfare, biosecurity) are, in his view, underrated and real; the AGI-superintelligence scenario is overblown. He ends by urging dialogue between the U.S. and China on shared risks from rogue actors and open-source proliferation, while acknowledging the deep mutual distrust that makes formal arms-control agreements essentially impossible at this stage.

A thought for your book

Chan's portrait of Beijing's AI worldview sits almost perfectly at the opposite pole from Silicon Valley's quasi-religious eschatology — no Omega Point, no machine god, no homo deus. What you might find generative: the Chinese model is also, in its own way, a version of homo economicus applied to AI — purely instrumental, collectively economistic, hostile to play and to what the government calls "wasted time." It's not an alternative to the Silicon Valley eschatology so much as its mirror image — the same foreclosure of genuine play, just in a different ideological register.

China and America as mimetic rivals in A.I.

Yi-Ling Liu, The U.S. and China Are Hurtling Toward a Shared A.I. Future, NYTimes, May 12, 2026.

This is a long article. Are are some highly selected excerpts.

The rivalry:

The growth of artificial intelligence has been presented as a rivalry between two fundamentally different systems. America commands capital and chips while China marshals engineering talent and manufacturing prowess. America holds an edge in building software — enterprise tools and cloud platforms. China leads in hardware — humanoids and autonomous vehicles. America pushes ahead with frontier models, with its artificial intelligence labs making moonshot bets to build a superintelligence. China focuses on scale and diffusion, with its tech firms embedding A.I. as quickly as possible in every sector of society.

We’ve been told that the ultimate prize in A.I. is the achievement of artificial general intelligence, or A.G.I. The country that figures this out, the theory holds, will establish world dominance through turbocharged economic and military power.

Internal division in both countries:

But looking past the headlines and the highlight reels, you can see the sharp divide in both countries brought on by A.I. Those who build and bankroll the technology speak of the future as a promise to be profited from, an opportunity to be exploited. In Silicon Valley, college dropouts talk of A.I. tackling climate change and curing disease. Researchers are courted with nine-figure salaries like N.B.A. stars, and roadside billboards call on residents to “Supercharge your A.I.” and “Stop Hiring Humans.” [...]

China’s tech hubs are driven by a similar sense of urgency. In Beijing’s Zhongguancun, known as China’s Silicon Valley, office towers stay lit deep into the night as A.I. lab employees hustle to beat their rivals across the road. Companies poach one another’s star engineers while freelance coders burn through tens of thousands of Claude tokens to vibecode products. [...]

Miming memes:

A parallel set of memes has emerged to capture the sense of powerlessness. In the United States, the Silicon Valley tech elite identify as “high agency,” while the rest of us are “bots” condemned to the “permanent underclass.” In China, ordinary workers describe themselves as shechu (“corporate cattle”) and jiabangou (“overtime dogs.”) These same workers have long used the viral term “involution” to capture the feeling of being trapped in a cycle of meaningless competition. In both countries, those disaffected by A.I. identify with the gaming meme of the “NPC” or “non-player character.” They feel like the background role in someone else’s video game, existing only to fill the world but not to shape it.

Frictionless companionship:

Outside the office, both Chinese and Americans have become enamored with A.I. as a source of frictionless companionship and emotional validation, with companies now monetizing emotional intimacy at scale. Over 70 percent of American teenagers report using chatbots as companions, nearly one in eight for mental health support.

Similarly, in China, one survey found that nearly half of young Chinese had used an A.I. chatbot to discuss their mental health. In a country where living alone is quickly becoming the norm — with single-person households expected to possibly reach 200 million by 2030 — A.I. companions have emerged as a quick fix to a growing loneliness epidemic.

Religion and spirituality:

The people of both countries are turning toward the spiritual for solace and agency in a world accelerating out of their control. The 20-somethings of America check astrology apps like Co-Star, part of a $3 billion dollar industry. Some in Gen Z are rediscovering Christianity, and religious conservatism has re-entered public life. In China, fortunetelling bars have popped up in cities, astrology apps like Cece are going viral and young people are consulting DeepSeek to predict their futures.

Nostalgia and authoratarianism:

When the future loses its promise, the past becomes a refuge. Both societies have seen a surge of nostalgia, a longing for a time remembered as simpler and more stable. Many Chinese idolize rural vloggers such as the celebrity YouTuber Li Ziqi, who rose to viral fame during the pandemic by sharing videos of her self-sufficient, pastoral life in the Sichuan countryside. You can see the same dynamics in the popularity of the tradwife Instagrammer known as Ballerina Farm, who documents her Utah homestead, milking cows and making doughnuts from scratch for her eight children. Both of those women live off the grid and embody an imagined idyll where chatbots and corporations do not exist.

Nostalgia also has a dark side, encouraging the rise of once fringe, illiberal ideas into the mainstream. This has been underway in China for years, with its influencers and ideologues rejecting liberal ideas and drifting toward a conservative centralized authority. In the United States, we see the growing influence of pundits like Curtis Yarvin, who argues that liberal democracy should be dismantled in favor of a C.E.O.-led monarchy and whose ideas have found an audience among both America’s tech and political elite, from Peter Thiel to JD Vance.

Final paragraph:

Once you step back, it’s easy to see the warping effect of the U.S. vs. China race. It’s a story used to justify sprinting ahead without guardrails in the name of beating the other. By focusing on our rivalry, we have become blind to our vulnerability. Instead of fixating on who crosses the finish line first, we must work together to lift up the people that both countries have left behind.

There's more at the link.

TO WAR! Part 1: War and America's National Psyche

Once again I"m bumping this to the top of the queue. And for obvious reasons. Once again a foolhardy President has taken the country into a war with no obvious end in sight, just a squandering of human live and productive resources.

* * * * * 

As part of a special WAR EDITION of New Savanna I'm reproducing a set of notes I wrote up during the 2000 Presidential Election. I first published them on NS back in November of 2011 and I'm republishing them now in recognition of yet another turn in the long-spinning wheel of American mythology. Yet another bump to the top, as I'm thinking of this stuff, this time in connection with the relationship between war and nationalism.

Everything is connected to everything else and the causal forces meeting in the historical present stretch back into the past without end. Figuring out where to start is not easy. My sense is that we need to focus our attention on the dissolution of the Soviet Empire in the late 1980s. That left the nation without a national scapegoat, thus radically altering the nation’s psycho-cultural landscape. We no longer had Ronald Reagan’s Evil Empire to kick around.

As some of you may know, my thinking on these matters has been strongly influenced by an essay Talcott Parsons published in 1947 on “Certain Primary Sources of Aggression in the Social Structure of the Western World”. Parsons argued that Western child-rearing practices generate a great deal of insecurity and anxiety at the core of personality structure. This creates an adult who has a great deal of trouble dealing with aggression and is prone to scapegoating. Inevitably, there are lots of aggressive impulses which cannot be followed out. They must be repressed. Ethnic scapegoating is one way to relieve the pressure of this repressed aggression. That, Parsons argued, is why the Western world is flush with nationalistic and ethnic antipathy. I suspect, in fact, that this dynamic is inherent in nationalism as a psycho-cultural phenomenon.

For the most part I have used Parsons, and others as well, in arguing about the nature of racism in the USA. While Africans were brought to this country for economic reasons it seems to me that during, say, the 19th century African Americans increasingly assumed a dual psychological role in the white psyche. On the one hand, they were a source of entertainment. On the other, they were convenient scapegoats, as became evident with the lynchings that emerged during Reconstruction and continued well into the last century. That is to say, African America served as a geographically internal target for the ethnic and nationalist antipathy Parsons discussed.

Thus we have the thesis in Klinkner and Smith, The Unsteady March (U. Chicago, 1999). They argue that African Americans have been able to move forward on civil rights only during periods where the nation faced an external threat - the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, and the major wars of the first half of the 20th century. When the external danger had subsided, gains were lost. From my point of view, they’re arguing that, when external danger looms large and demands attention, the citizenry can focus aggression there and so ease up on the internal colony. Beyond this, of course, it becomes necessary to recruit from the colony to fight the external enemy, both physically and propagandistically - be kind to your black citizens when you fight the Nazis, etc.

  

Vietnam was the last major war of the Cold War period. As it receded into the past, a political backlash set in and affirmative action came under attack. That’s the situation we faced when the Soviet Empire collapsed. With the major external threat suddenly collapsed, there was a crisis of aggression - I’m reminded of the phrase “conservation of aggression” coined by Robert Wright. The fall of the Evil Empire deprived a great many people of an object for aggressive impulses. What then, happened to that aggression?

It got directed elsewhere. My sense is that the political rhetoric on a number of issues heated up in the wake of the fall: gun control, abortion, the arts, gays, affirmative action, violence in the media. A number of these issues come under the rubric of the so-called “culture wars”. Each of these issues was already on the political agenda, and had been there for some time.

Sexy music had been inspiring pulpit denunciations and legislative action since the early decades of the 20th century. Movies have been problematic since the beginning and the NAACP put itself on the political map by organizing protests against “Birth of a Nation.” But, it seems to me, that the scope of politicized cultural contest broadened. [If I’m correct, then this could be verified empirically by doing content analysis of periodicals, looking at opinion polls, crime rates, etc.]

Perhaps the most interesting redirection, however, was into the so-called War on Drugs. Political concern about drug use is not, of course, new. It goes back to Prohibition - which, was, of course, intimately linked with that objectionably sexy music - and got redirected by and in reaction to the counter-cultural 60s and 70s. However, it is my impression that the current effort ramped up in the wake of the Soviet collapse.

This war on drugs has had substantial material consequences: increased law enforcement and court activity, a considerable increase in the prison population and, of course, in the prison industry. Our prisons now have a relatively large population of non-violent offenders who are disproportionately black, taken off the voting rolls as felons, and available for labor in various prison-based enterprises. I do not know whether or not the increase in the economic “weight” of the prison sector is roughly equal to the losses suffered by the defense sector. I would, of course, like to know.

Regardless of how those numbers work out, my basic point is simply that the end of the Cold War changed the psycho-cultural system in a major way. Psycho-cultural aggression had to be redirected and much of it was redirected at targets within the country, rather than externally. That redirection is the central political phenomenon of the 90s and is responsible for much of the ugliness and programmatic futility of current politics.

Addendum 2011: Obviously, this internal redirection of aggression continues. It may well have gotten worse – I wonder what ‘sentiment analysis’ would turn up if applied to documents written over the past decade? The problem facing us, of course, is not that of finding suitable targets for this displaced aggression. No, we have to restructure our way of living so as to reduce our need to have such targets. That’s a tough one, and one that will take a generation or three.

Addendum 2014: Obviously the Arab world is a perfect target for this repressed aggression. We've got a long-standing and well-crafted Orientalist mythology of the exotic and crazy Arab Other. I fear we're going to be banging on this nail for a long time.

 

Note 2026: The second post in this series has a clip from the Marx Brothers movie, Duck Soup, that can be taken as a comment on how Trump arrived at the decision to attack Iran: TO WAR! Part 2: A Marx Brothers Analysis of America's War Craziness.  

Hon. Martha A. Mills (ret): Lawyer, Activist, Judge

Martha Mills is a friend of mine. She took a course on the history of technology taught by my teacher, David Hays, and became fascinated by his ideas. That's how I know here. I published a review of her 2015 book, Lawyer, Activist, Judge: Fighting for Civil and Voting Rights in Mississippi and Illinois, in 3 Quarks Daily in 2016.

Here's a short professional biography on the website of the American College of Trial Lawyers:

Mills was appointed in 1995 by the Illinois Supreme Court to serve as a Judge of the Circuit Court of Cook County. She served for two years, primarily in the Juvenile Justice, Child Protection Division. She was recalled in 2007, and was Supervising Judge of the Parentage and Child Support Court until December of 2012. Under her guidance, the court started a highly successful pilot restorative justice program with the help of Elizabeth J. Vastine and Peter Newman. Since her retirement she has continued to to teach and offer services in community building and restorative practices.

After law school, Mills was the first woman lawyer with White & Case in NYC. She then joined the staff of the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law in Mississippi where she tried many cases, civil and criminal, getting the first jury verdict in Mississippi since Reconstruction for over a million dollars on behalf of the estate of an African American man murdered by the Klan. She was Chief Counsel of the Lawyers Committee Office in Cairo, IL prior to moving back to Chicago. She has practiced law in Illinois since 1969, both as a trial and appellate attorney. The American Bar Association in 2013 published her book: Lawyer, Activist, Judge: Fighting for Civil and Voting Rights in Mississippi and Illinois.

Judge Mills was a trial lawyer for more than forty years. She is licensed to practice in the states of Illinois, New York and Mississippi, and in numerous federal courts. She has argued cases in the Mississippi, Illinois and U.S. Supreme Courts. She has not only arbitrated, mediated and facilitated many cases and conflicts, but also taught others to do so. As founder and Executive Director of Transforming Communities, a not-for-profit corporation, she engaged consulting, practice, education and training in restorative justice from 1996-2007, as well as work in violence prevention and intervention.

Among universities, the Chinese are moving up, USA is moving down

Just think, a century ago most Americans thought of Charlie Chan, a movie detective, when they they thought on the Chinese. And Chinatown, of course. In the 1960s a character named "Hop Sing" appeared as comic relieve in the hit TV program Bonanza. He was the house boy for the wealthy Cartwright family – note the word "boy." And then came the war in Vietnam along with Chairman Mao and his Red Book. When I was in graduate school in the 1970s I took a course on radical approaches to literature, taught be Art Efron. We read a collection of essays on aesthetics written by Mao.

Mark Arsenault, Chinese Universities Surge in Global Rankings as U.S. Schools Slip, NYTimes, Jan 15, 2026. The article opens:

Until recently, Harvard was the most productive research university in the world, according to a global ranking that looks at academic publication.

That position may be teetering, the most recent evidence of a troubling trend for American academia.

Harvard recently dropped to No. 3 on the ranking. The schools racing up the list are not Harvard’s American peers, but Chinese universities that have been steadily climbing in rankings that emphasize the volume and quality of research they produce.

The reordering comes as the Trump administration has been slashing research funding to American schools that depend heavily on the federal government to pay for scientific endeavors. President Trump’s policies did not start the American universities’ relative decline, which began years ago, but they could accelerate it.

“There is a big shift coming, a bit of a new world order in global dominance of higher education and research,” said Phil Baty, chief global affairs officer for Times Higher Education, a British organization unconnected to The New York Times that produces one of the better-known world rankings of universities.

In the middle of this long article:  

The number of international students arriving in the U.S. in August 2025 was 19 percent lower than the year before, a trend that could further hurt the prestige and rankings of American schools if the world’s best minds choose to study and work elsewhere.

China has been pouring billions of dollars into its universities and aggressively working to make them attractive to foreign researchers. In the fall, China began offering a visa specifically for graduates of top universities in science and technology to travel to China to study or do business.

“China has a boatload of money in higher education that it didn’t have 20 years ago,” said Alex Usher, president of Higher Education Strategy Associates, a Toronto education consulting company.

Mr. Xi has made the reasons for the country’s investments explicit, arguing that a nation’s global power depends on its scientific dominance.

There's much more in the article.

23% chance that the USA will buy part of Greenland for $500 to $700 billion

BREAKING: Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, overseeing Greenland acquisition — $500-$700 billion offer being prepared.

23% chance it happens.https://t.co/r6FFiR9iPE

— Polymarket (@Polymarket) January 14, 2026

An underground American military base in Greenland in the 1950s (now abandoned)

00:00 Intro
02:17 No man’s land
03:44 Why America wants Greenland
06:55 The 1950s
09:41 A city with a secret
11:07 How to build Camp Century
16:11 Living under the ice
19:10 The end of Project Iceworm
20:42 The future

The Coming AI Resistance

Michelle Goldberg had an interesting column in the NYTimes yesterday, (Dec. 29): An Anti-A.I. Movement Is Coming. Which Party Will Lead It?

I disagree with the anti-immigrant, anti-feminist, bitterly reactionary right-wing pundit Matt Walsh about basically everything, so I was surprised to come across a post of his that precisely sums up my view of artificial intelligence. “We’re sleepwalking into a dystopia that any rational person can see from miles away,” he wrote in November, adding, “Are we really just going to lie down and let AI take everything from us?”

A.I. obviously has beneficial uses, especially medical ones; it may, for example, be better than humans at identifying localized cancers from medical imagery. But the list of things it is ruining is long.

She then goes on to discuss some. She notes:

Despite Trump’s embrace of the A.I. industry, attitudes toward the technology don’t break down along neat partisan lines. Rather, A.I. divides both parties. Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, is a fierce skeptic; this month he proposed an A.I. Bill of Rights that would, among other things, require consumers to be notified when they’re interacting with A.I., provide parental controls on A.I. chatbots and put guardrails around the use of A.I. in mental health counseling. Speaking on CNN on Sunday, Senator Bernie Sanders suggested a moratorium on new data center construction. “Frankly, I think you’ve got to slow this process down,” he said.

Yet a number of leading Democrats are bullish on A.I., hoping to attract technology investments to their states and, perhaps, burnish their images as optimistic and forward-looking. “This technology is going to be a game changer,” Gov. Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania said at an A.I. summit in October. “We are just at the beginning of this revolution, and Pennsylvania is poised to take advantage of it.” He’s started a pilot program to get more state employees using generative A.I. at work, and, by streamlining permitting processes, he has made the building of A.I. data centers easier.

Her final paragraph:

One major question, going into 2026, is which party will speak for the Americans who abhor the incursions of A.I. into their lives and want to see its reach restricted. Another is whether widespread public hostility to this technology even matters given all the money behind it. We’ll soon start to find out not just how much A.I. is going to remake our democracy, but also to what degree we still have one.

Swisher and Galloway predict that Trump is going to get rid of 3 of the following 4: Hegseth, Patel, RFK and Noem.

First up, Oprah loves Scott, and Kara comments on her role in the Nuzzi-Lizza-RFK Jr drama. Then, they react to reports that Anthropic is eyeing an IPO, and Sam Altman declaring a “code red” at OpenAI. Plus, what it means that Netflix has sweetened its bid for Warner Bros. Discovery, and Scott’s coming around on Bitcoin. Stay tuned for predictions to hear which members of the Trump administration Scott thinks will get the boot soon.

00:00 Intro
9:06 Nuzzi & Lizza & RFK Jr
16:40 Anthropic IPO?
23:17 Warner Bros. Bids
34:58 Michael Dell’s Trump Accounts Donation
38:48 Bitcoin Takes a Dive
43:09 Costco Sues U.S. Government
48:17 Predictions

On the predictions, Trump is going get rid of three of these four are out: Hegseth, Patel, RFK and possibly Noem.

On the laws of war and moral integrity

David French, Pete Hegseth Is Doing Something Even Worse Than Breaking the Law, NYTimes, Dec. 4,2025.

This is a long column, worth reading in full, but I'm only going to print a few excerpts. The opening paragraph:

In their military campaign in South America, Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth aren’t just defying the Constitution and breaking the law. They are attacking the very character and identity of the American military.

Then comes a discussion of the rationale for the laws of war and of the current case, the strikes of September 2. Then, after the half-way point:

The laws of war aren’t woke. They’re not virtue signaling. And they’re not a sign that the West has forgotten how to fight. Instead, they provide the American military with a number of concrete benefits.

First, complying with the laws of war can provide a battlefield advantage. This year I read Antony Beevor’s classic history of the end of Nazi Germany, “The Fall of Berlin 1945.” I was struck by a fascinating reality: Hitler’s troops fought fanatically against the Soviets not simply to preserve Hitler’s rule (most knew the cause was lost) but also to slow the Red Army down, to buy more time for civilians and soldiers to escape to American, British and French lines.

In short, because of our humanity and decency, Germans surrendered when they would have fought. The contrast with the brutality of the Soviets saved American lives.

I saw this reality in Iraq. By the end of my deployment in 2008, insurgents started surrendering to us, often without a fight. In one memorable incident, a terrorist walked up to the front gate of our base and turned himself in. [...]

Second, the laws of war make war less savage and true peace possible. One of the reasons the war in the Pacific was so unrelentingly grim was that the Japanese military never made the slightest pretense of complying with the laws of war. They would shoot shipwrecked survivors. They would torture prisoners. They would fight to the death even when there was no longer any military point to resistance.

We were hardly perfect, but part of our own fury was directly related to relentless Japanese violations of the laws of war. We became convinced that the Japanese would not surrender until they faced the possibility of total destruction. And when both sides abandon any commitment to decency and humanity, then the object of war changes — from victory to annihilation.

Even if only one side upholds the law of war, it not only makes war less brutal; it preserves the possibility of peace and reconciliation. That’s exactly what happened at the end of World War II. For all of our faults, we never became like the Soviets and thus have a very different relationship with our former foes.

Finally, the laws of war help preserve a soldier’s soul. We are a nation built around the notion of human dignity. Our Declaration of Independence highlights the worth of every person. Our Bill of Rights stands as one of the world’s great statements of human dignity. It is contrary to the notion of virtuous American citizenship to dehumanize people, to brutalize and oppress them.

There's more at the link, much more.

On the moral cost of the boat strikes [blood and circuses?]

Phil Klay, Trump’s Boat Strikes Corrode America’s Soul, NYTimes, Dec. 5, 2025.

There are many reasons to object to the policies that the Trump administration’s videos and memes showcase. Yet the images themselves also inflict wounds[...] The president inhabits a position of moral leadership. When the president and his officials sell their policies, they’re selling a version of what it means to be an American — what should evoke our love and our hate, our disgust and our delight. If all governments rest on opinion, as James Madison thought, then it is this moral shaping of the electorate that gives the president his freedom of action, and that we will still have to reckon with once he is gone.

Later:

There are many reasons to object to the policies that the Trump administration’s videos and memes showcase. Yet the images themselves also inflict wounds, of the kind that Alypius suffered when he raised his eyelids. The president inhabits a position of moral leadership. When the president and his officials sell their policies, they’re selling a version of what it means to be an American — what should evoke our love and our hate, our disgust and our delight. If all governments rest on opinion, as James Madison thought, then it is this moral shaping of the electorate that gives the president his freedom of action, and that we will still have to reckon with once he is gone.

The president’s supporters seem to grasp this. Fox News’s Jesse Watters responded with utter incredulity that the United States would offer quarter to an enemy. “We’re blowing up terrorists in the Caribbean,” he said on Monday, “but we’re supposed to rescue them from drowning if they survive?” Others went further. “I really do kind of not only want to see them killed in the water, whether they’re on the boat or in the water,” Megyn Kelly, the conservative podcaster, said, “but I’d really like to see them suffer. I would like Trump and Hegseth to make it last a long time so they lose a limb and bleed out.”

An Associated Press investigation suggests that the men Ms. Kelly would like to watch slowly die are often poor laborers: a fisherman, a motorcycle taxi driver, a bus driver, living in cinder-block homes with spotty water and power service, making at least $500 per trip ferrying cocaine, a crime Americans normally judge worthy of a prison sentence rather than a torturous death.

The Trump administration’s celebration of death brings us far from discussions of the law of armed conflict, the constitutionality of the strikes or even the Christian morality that would eventually push Augustine to formulate an early version of just-war theory. We’re in the Colosseum, one brought to us digitally so that we need not leave our homes to hear the cheers of the crowd, to watch the killing done for our entertainment and suffer the same harm that injured Alypius more than 1,600 years ago.

Why the Trump-backed candidate lost in New Jersey

Nick Corasaniti and Tracey Tully, 6 Takeaways From Democrat Mikie Sherrill’s Victory in New Jersey, NYTimes, Nov. 5, 2025.

The race was expected to be close. In fact, it was a blowout.

Representative Mikie Sherrill beat Jack Ciattarelli by a wide margin, becoming the second woman to be elected governor of New Jersey.

Ms. Sherrill, a Democrat, made her opposition to President Trump the cornerstone of her campaign against Mr. Ciattarelli, a Republican who crisscrossed the state with fervor, trying to replicate the inroads Mr. Trump made with Latino and Black voters in New Jersey last November.

Mr. Ciattarelli, who was endorsed by Mr. Trump in May, had gambled that his new alliance with a president he once called a charlatan would help him run up the score, even in a left-leaning state.

Here's why:

• Sherrill energized the Democratic base.
• Trump gave Sherrill an unexpected gift. [terminating the Gateway project]
• Turnout soared.
• Sherrill’s anti-Trump message resonated powerfully.
• Republicans saw a drop-off without Trump on the ballot.
• In a battle over biography, Sherrill won.

Rebuilding Corporate Research for a Stronger American Future

Tsao, Jeffrey, Beyond the Endless Frontier: Rebuilding Corporate Research for a Stronger American Future (October 13, 2025). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=5600892 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.5600892

The American R&D enterprise, long considered the global gold standard and a cornerstone of national security and economic competitiveness, faces mounting concerns regarding its productivity and societal relevance alongside intensifying international competition. In the meantime, a powerful component of that enterprise that, in the 20th century, helped create the science and technology foundation for our 21st century world lies dormant. That component is corporate research labs: labs that uniquely excelled at research embedded in real-world problemand-technology-rich use environments but curiosity-motivated to learn and discover with ultimate benefit to broader society. Here, we sketch a complete, though still evolving, vision for corporate research, its importance to a healthy R&D enterprise, and how we might rebuild it in a 21st century public-privatepartnership form. We refer to the vision as the "Bell Labs Xs" vision, to signify that there would be many Bell Labs Xs, all emulating the essential magic of corporate research labs such as the iconic Bell Labs of the 20th century while competing with each other and evolving in an "X-like" manner. This vision represents a radical rethinking of the Endless Frontier's sole focus on academia-harnessing American industrial prowess to create public, not just private, goods, and in doing so revitalizing American leadership in societally relevant science and technology.

H/t Tyler Cowen.

Growth in the American economy is now tied to AI

So is it a bubble?

If I had a way to reliably forecast financial bubbles I’d be a trading billionaire not writing political columns. https://t.co/jtPIEInPON

— Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias) October 16, 2025

The Tide Turned This Week | Heather Cox Richardson

Read “The sleeping giant is awakening“ by Robert Reich here: https://robertreich.substack.com/p/the-sleeping-giant-is-awakening

The Lie At The Heart Of Modern Conservatism (w/ Heather Cox Richardson)

YouTube:

NOTE: This livestream was recorded on Wednesday, September 17th at 3pm ET.

Is Trump and MAGA the inevitable endpoint to conservatism in America? JVL was joined by Heather Cox Richardson to discuss the state of conservatism in American politics.

The discussion gets really interesting around 21 minutes or so when Heather Cox Richardson advances the idea that the collapse of the Soviet Union is what began the slide toward the highly polarized society we now have.