scaredketchup: November is Coming

Big Tech is about data politics. Time to bone up on it.

Tressie McMillan Cottom, Want to Fight Back Against Big Tech? Start Here. NYTimes, August 3, 2026. She begins:

In June, I wrote about how the data center revolts happening across the country get to the heart of our greatest political problems. Artificial intelligence is not just a market product or a scientific achievement. It is a political theory. And it is gobbling up our democracy.

The challenge this presents to a functioning democracy is immense. Democrats cannot just “win the midterms” and go back to life before Donald Trump and his army of tech bros upended our way of life. We can talk about reforming the Supreme Court, ending the filibuster, enshrining women’s autonomy in the Constitution and getting money out of elections. But those things won’t matter if we don’t change our laws and norms about what I am calling data politics.

All of the speculation and hype around A.I. is hiding the fact that the technology isn’t just large language models or agents or data centers. It is the backbone of a superstructure that merges regressive politics with unchecked economic power in the guise of technological innovation. Put simply, there is too much money, some of it too untraceable, giving a small group of unelected people too much power over the people. That’s data politics.

Data politics is the right’s answer to what’s next after Trump: more Trumpism, without the man who gave away the country’s store for personal gain. What should the left’s answer be?

She then goes on to list a bunch of books people should read.

Democratic socialism, American style: Douthat interviews Bashar Sunkara

Ross Douthat, A Vision of a ‘Society Without Capitalism’, NYTimes, July 16, 2026

Democratic socialists are having a moment. But can they actually remake the Democratic Party — and the American economy — in their image? My guest today, Bhaskar Sunkara [founding editor of Jacobin], WLB, is a longtime democratic socialist, and he makes the case that socialism has a universal appeal that transcends our current politics and will ultimately triumph against capitalism.

Well into the interview, Bill of Rights socialism:

Douthat: So you’re saying that if there’s a socialist contract with America, it does not promise collectivization and a one-party state?

Sunkara: I think we believe in a Bill of Rights socialism.

Douthat: So what is it?

Sunkara: There’s an immediate set of demands that you could call us attempting to bring about doses of socialism within capitalism.

This comes in the realm of decommodification of certain goods, providing them as social rights instead of them being dependent on your ability to pay.

Health care in America is partially decommodified. If you’re elderly, if you’re very poor, if you’re a child, you’re going to have guaranteed access to health care. We want to see that extended.

Same thing with things like Social Security and certain other benefits, or an expansion of the welfare state — not unlike Norway.

I also would go further and say that even within capitalism in the here and now, there are sectors of the economy that I would like to see greater state control of. In the old language of the left, we would call it the commanding heights of the economy, but even things like rail — there are benefits to selective nationalization, particularly of natural monopolies.

That vision right there of socialism within capitalism, could be true of a lot of social democrats.

So beyond that, the question is: Why would you go about calling yourself a democratic socialist? For me, I call myself a democratic socialist because I actually believe in a socialism beyond capitalism.

I actually do believe in an economy built on the idea that workers should control their workplaces and on this more radical vision of a society without capitalism, even if it still has a motor needed for investment and for efficiency gains and growth and so on.

Housing:

Douthat: OK. But those people in Queens who you mentioned, they’re concerned about housing, right? Is the leftward view of what housing policy should be for the Democrats, going forward?

Sunkara: I think everyone can see, across the political spectrum, that there’s a huge problem with housing construction in the U.S.

So Zohran’s policy, for example, in New York, is very heavily built around upzoning and making it easier for developers to build, and I think people agree with that.

But beyond that, I think on the left, we point to successful examples around the world of public housing being done right. We think at least part of the construction needs to be public housing. We also need to maintain and expand existing units.

I think that’s the room for the state to step up and do more things. But I think these solutions are largely, first and foremost, on the supply side. Then beyond that, we do believe in certain stabilizations and other things.

Douthat: Rent stabilization, meaning rent control or —

Sunkara: Rent control, which can be designed well. It could also be designed poorly.

But you could imagine, for example, telling landlords: “We’re going to clear the way. We’re going to allow you to create this big housing development. We’re going to fight against the interests of local homeowners, and you build your big piece of housing. But after 30 years, after you have a reasonable return on investment, that unit is going to have some degree of rent stabilization,” for instance.

That, to me, is a perfectly common sense, economically coherent vision for housing. I know there’s lots of talk on the left and in the Democratic Party about the debate over abundance, but fundamentally, any form of social democracy is grow-give.

There needs to be a motor for economic investment. There needs to be profitability in order to have something to redistribute. The added component that I would say is an important part of a socialist agenda is making sure that there are strong unions in workplaces that can advocate for higher wages even before the state gets involved with redistribution.

A.I.:

Douthat: What about A.I.? Bernie has taken some pretty strong stances, I would say. He has sort of staked out a position as the Democratic politician most open to both doomer narratives about A.I., but also most enthused about the prospect of strong government intervention.

What is the socialist position on the A.I. industry right now?

Sunkara: I think there’s a host of different socialist positions. I lean more on the side of just seeing it as any other technology. Companies are going to invest in new technologies. The economy is going to change. We’re going to need to adapt and figure out how to regulate it.

Obviously, any changes that we do, any regulation we need to do, need to make sense in an international context too.

It doesn’t make sense to tank certain U.S. companies if there’s going to be other companies creating the same disruption that are coming from other parts of the world.

But I think this gets to the level of policy where there’s legitimate debates. I think the idea which has been touted by figures as varied as Bernie Sanders and Steve Bannon is of the U.S. government owning a stake in major A.I. companies.

It makes perfect sense, too. But, fundamentally, we have to respond to a dynamic economy in which there’s always going to be new technologies, there’s always going to be new wants and needs, and new goods and services, and we need regulation that’s able to be flexible and adapt with changes. [...]

There needs to be a motor for economic investment. There needs to be profitability in order to have something to redistribute. The added component that I would say is an important part of a socialist agenda is making sure that there are strong unions in workplaces that can advocate for higher wages even before the state gets involved with redistribution.

What of capitalism?

Douthat: But just pulling back, I feel like we’ve danced around this a little bit, so let me just ask it directly: Is democratic socialism compatible with capitalism?

Sunkara: In the long term, no. We’re anticapitalist. We want a world beyond capitalism. But in the short term, while we’re within a capitalist economy, of course, we need firms that are profitable, that are providing employment, that are providing taxation. So I think to govern in the short term as social democrats, we need profitable firms.

But in the long term, you know, I don’t hide my desire that I think the economy should be socialized, even if I think in the socialized economy, there needs to be a role for markets and also a role for worker-controlled firms to be able to meet people’s needs and provide new goods and services.

Douthat: What’s the distinction you make between capitalism and markets then?

Sunkara: Well, I think markets existed before capitalism. Capitalism is a regime of property ownership that says that as an individual capitalist or as a corporation, we own this private property and we use this private property to employ people and to produce goods and services.

And in my vision of a just society, of a socialist society, that private property would be controlled by ordinary workers who would get their financing from public banks, who would still operate with hard budgets. They would still need to meet goods and services and meet their payroll obligations and things like that.

But you don’t have a class of people who, as individuals, control investment decisions.

There's much more at the link.

We need a more balanced approach to developing and deploying AI

Eric Schmidt and Selina Xu, We Must Address the Growing Rage Against the A.I. Machine, NYTimes, July 11, 2026.

On the whole US AI developers want to move as fast as possible while the public is increasingly skeptical and opposed. The Chinese are more cautious and want to develop AI while preserving social stability thus the Chinese public are more optimistic about AI than Americans.

Dismissing A.I. entirely would be a mistake. The technology can help diagnose diseases, predict protein folding, improve farming, forecast disasters better, design new materials, accelerate scientific and drug discovery and power robots in dangerous environments to improve human safety (such as in space, firefighting and minefields).

Yet how technology spreads is never inevitable. If A.I. is viewed as benefiting the few at the expense of the majority, then the public will rage against the machine. And A.I. won’t be able to make our lives better in the long run if it cannot survive in the short term. The real challenge, then, isn’t whether the United States or China will build an overwhelming, insurmountable advantage over the other. It’s whether either can figure out how to realize the benefits of A.I. without ripping apart its social fabric. Neither has found the answer yet.

Silicon Valley tech executives and policymakers across the country are waking up to that fact. States have introduced dozens of bills this year to put safety and privacy guardrails around A.I. The Trump administration issued a new executive order that seeks to give the government more oversight over new models before they’re released to the public. [...]

To get to the other end of the tightrope, we need radical and incremental solutions alike. Here’s one to start: a populist A.I. agenda that treats the technology as a public project. Just as NASA made space a national mission rather than a private one, the government should now do the same for A.I. to ensure that its benefits reach the public, not just the companies building it. Here are some concrete ways to do that:

One, treat some A.I. profits as a shared resource and distribute them directly to citizens. This can be in the form of a sovereign wealth fund, seeded by contributions from A.I. companies in the form of stock or cash. [...]

Two, support public-interest A.I. models that the private sector might not be incentivized to build. Examples include models to help citizens navigate government services and benefits, to help them gain legal aid or to help educate their children. We strongly believe in the importance of open-source A.I., which anyone can freely use and modify. [...]

Three, regulate one area that attracts bipartisan agreement: the way children and teens interact with A.I.

There's more at the link.

Pope Leo presents Magnifica Humanitas while standing next to a tech founder

Motoko Rich and Elisabetta Povoledo, Pope Leo Warns of Risks From A.I. in 42,300-Word Encyclical, NYTimes, May 25, 2026.

Leo’s declaration came in the form of a papal encyclical, an open letter to “all people of good will” that ran to roughly 42,300 words in its English version. It outlined his desire to protect human dignity and agency in an age in which technology threatens to replace humans in many professional and social roles. He presented it alongside Christopher Olah, a co-founder of Anthropic, a major A.I. developer, in a symbolic gesture of dialogue between leaders of the spiritual and technological worlds.

This, obviously, is a political move. And it makes sense that Anthropic would be chosen to represent the AI industry. For one thing, recent events in the United States (I’m thinking of the contretemps with the Pentagon) have pushed it onto the stage ahead of OpenAI. Then we have machines, that it’s founders split from OpenAI because they felt that OpenAI had lost sight of it’s mission, to develop “safe” AI. Finally, Chris Olah is one of the original researchers in mechanistic interpretability. On the other hand, from my point of view, Anthropic seems no less vulnerable to hubristic overreach than any other AI company. Despite the “feel good” nature of Dario Amodei’s essay, Machines of Loving Grace, his statement from February, 2026, that AGI is imminent, late 2026 or 2027, is not evidence of epistemic humility.

The article foes on:

While emphasizing that “technology should not be considered, in itself, as a force antagonistic to humanity,” he wrote that “the pursuit of greater profits cannot justify choices that systematically sacrifice jobs.”

Among other things, Leo called for:

• government regulation of the private companies that are driving the development of A.I. 
• protection and retraining for workers whose jobs are threatened
• education to help students think critically about the technology
• action to protect children from violent, hypersexualized or fake information online that is often generated by A.I.
• safeguards to ensure that humans, not artificial intelligence, remain responsible for all decisions regarding the use of weapons. 

Above all he emphasized the importance of retaining a fundamental social role for all human beings. “A society that guarantees employment to only a small fraction of the population, despite having a high level of technical development, risks exposing many to forced inactivity, a lack of responsibility and the absence of daily tasks and stimuli, resulting in human and cultural impoverishment,” he said.

“This creates a paradox of material progress and anthropological regression that undermines the foundations of a just and stable social peace,” he added.

Some background on the encyclical:

Although Leo publicly presented his encyclical on Monday, he formally signed it on May 15, the 135th anniversary of the publication of “Rerum Novarum,” — or “Of New Things” in English — a major encyclical written in 1891 by his namesake, Leo XIII.

The pope’s encyclical was timed to prompt comparisons with that earlier document, which guided Catholic teaching on how to protect workers after the technological and industrial disruptions of the 19th century.

Written amid the upheaval of the Industrial Revolution, “Rerum Novarum” sought to safeguard the rights and dignity of the working class and became one of the foundational texts of modern Catholic social teaching. It called on governments to “save unfortunate working people from the cruelty of men of greed, who use human beings as mere instruments for money making,” even as it praised the “discoveries of science.”

In the new encyclical, titled “Magnifica Humanitas,” or “Magnificent Humanity,” Leo struck a similar tone, warning of the new threat to workers posed by artificial intelligence.

Work, he wrote, is more than a way of earning income, but “a requirement of the human condition, a normal path toward maturity, development and personal fulfillment.” He called for “the protection of employment opportunities and the irreplaceable role of the individual.”

Leo expressed concern at how emerging A.I. tools might take over many routine tasks and jobs, implicitly devaluing those who do not have the training or ability to perform the work that remains available to humans. Leo wrote of the importance of preserving human dignity and warned of the “insidious” ideology that “suggests that every person must earn or justify his or her own worth, to the point of attributing greater value to those who are more efficient or effective.”

Do I detect an opening for Homo ludens? The document also warns about the development of A.I. for wartime use. 

Going on:

Although the encyclical includes significant references to scripture and religious teachings, the document in many ways reads like a policy paper from a think tank or a lawmaker.

Hmmm....

Will the document have any effect on the tech industry?

Brian Patrick Green, director of technology ethics at Santa Clara University in Northern California, said some technology leaders “will have to take it seriously in a sense,” partly because it provides them with “a moral imperative.”

Writing in the encyclical, the pope recognized the autonomy of governments and private companies. The church, he said, “does not claim to supplant the responsibilities of politics or institutions, but offers itself as a foundation,” urging other institutions to “recognize and promote whatever serves the dignity of persons, the vitality of communities and the common good.”

Others said that an encyclical’s primary targets are the clergy and the faithful.

“I don’t think the ‘tech bros’ in Silicon Valley will listen that much,” said Prof. Noreen Herzfeld, director of a program on technology and ethics at St. John’s School of Theology and Seminary in Collegeville, Minn. “But I think within the church, it will be there as a reference for priests and bishops and particularly for those of us who are educating seminarians or young people.”

I agree with Herzfeld. I doubt that the tech bros care about anything other than money, power, and (personal) glory.

There's more at the link. You can read or download Magnifica Humanitas here.

ADDENDUM: That is to say, the generous, altruistic, and even utopian statements by powerful techbros may be grounded in sincere intentions. But the business environment in which they operate negates those intentions. Furthermore, consider AI Doomers. OpenAI, after all, was founded out of fear of AI Doom. The founders of Anthropic left OpenAI because they felt OpenAI had all but abandoned its commitment to “safe” AI. But just what is their commitment to safety? Well, sure, yes, they’ve held back Mythos from general release.

But they’re continuing on toward Mount AGI, followed by ASI, though they fear/know there’s a possibility of Doom ahead. Why? “Because we’ve got to beat the Chinese”, that’s why. Give me a break. More and more I’m thinking that AI Doom is a way to square the ethical circle, to have your cake and eat it too, to continuing developing AI while knowing that it will likely cause tremendous disruption in the lives of OTHERS, but not the developers, not the developers, who’ll be sitting fat and sassy behind the walls of their gated communities.

The American political system is broken. How can we fix it?

Jerry Cayford has an interesting article in the curren issue of 3 Quarks Daily: Final Five and U.S. Competitiveness.

The opening paragraphs:

California’s primary is in about two weeks, and it’s a mess. The panic is slightly subsiding, though, since Democrats have started polling in one of the top two spots in the race for governor. For months, Republicans were polling first and second, with eight Democrats trailing because they split the vote. The California Democratic Party chair even urged low-polling candidates to drop out so as not to be spoilers.

This can all look like an amusing soap opera. Will the Democrats shoot themselves in the foot, again? But studying it led me to literature I hadn’t found before, coming from a quarter I hadn’t expected: the Harvard Business School (HBS). An HBS study of American economic competitiveness shows that a surprisingly short path leads from an amusing soap opera to the gravest of questions: why is American society failing?

The final paragraph;

Do you want to repair crumbling roads and bridges, lower infant mortality rate, or fix K-12 education? The single most effective remedy is “nonpartisan top-five primaries and ranked choice voting in general elections.” Are you trying to improve health care, life expectancy, or public transportation? Your method is “Final Five Voting.” The powerful message of HBS’s U.S. Competitiveness Project is that electoral reform is our main tool to end dysfunctional politics, strengthen U.S. competitiveness, and stop America’s decline. Want paid leave and walkable cities? Or—updating from 2019 to today—do you seek to compete with China on anything at all, unwind predatory monopolies, or develop more useful, less dangerous artificial intelligence? All of it. The basic aspects of a civilized life. The answer is the same. Put your effort into nonpartisan top-five primaries and ranked choice voting in general elections, aka Final Five Voting.

It's clear to me that we really do need to change the system. Would that work, is it sufficient, a start? Who knows. How do we get there?

Here's a comment I made:

Thinks for this (and the links). You've given me something to think about. I especially like the phrase, “political industrial complex.” That seems exactly right.

Here’s what I’ve been thinking. For all my life I’ve believed that America is a democracy, whatever that is. I’ve been something of a leftist at least since my mid-teens, I marched against the war in Vietnam (and was a conscientious objector); I did not jump for joy when Clinton was elected; but I did manage a little hop when Obama was elected. That didn’t last long. Trump 1 was a disaster. Through all this I kept telling myself: “Yep, we’re still a democracy, still a democracy, yessiree, still a democracy...” And all this time I’d read here and there: “No, America is not, a democracy; it’s an oligarchy ruled by rich people and corporations.”

Trump 2 has got me rethinking. On the one hand, the corruption is so extreme and so naked. That’s one thing. But at the same time we have the rise of AI and the link between AI and the Trump administration through Elon “the world’s richest man” Musk, David Sacks, who was tech advisor to the president until quite recently, and the various entrepreneurs and executives who’ve been glad to kiss the presidential ring. The AI business is tightly controlled by a small group of tech bros (& maybe a woman or two in there somewhere) who control an enormous amount of money. As a result we’ve got an unprecedented concentration of wealth and power around the presidency pumping money through the political industrial complex.

Take that in conjunction with the political industrial complex and it’s beginning to look like the country is one giant board game where the oligarchs are the game players and the rest of us are just pieces on the board (or NPC’s). It’s Plato’s cave reconstructed with 21st century technology. The oligarchs are running a shadow play and we think it’s the real game. It’s not.

Voting for the the craziest SOB

For the uninitiated https://t.co/vXaGmgziSI pic.twitter.com/2CDHNmhfeo

— Liam Donovan (@LPDonovan) January 4, 2021

Trump is hell-bent on nuking America back to the Stone Age

OK, OK, I get it. That statement is exaggerated and misleading. The Stone Age is too far back, 1960 will do. He’s not using nukes, he’s using oil and coal. And he’s doing considerable damage in the process.

Thomas Edsall has a long article on the subject – all his articles are long – in today’s New York Times, “Trump Is Fighting the World’s Stupidest Culture War,” May 12, 2026. His opening salvo: “On the day our oil-stained president returned to the White House, he began an all-out assault on clean energy. Today, 16 months later, he and his party are paying a significant political price while American consumers are stuck with the bill.”

Edsall goes on:

That bill, according to one scholarly estimate, totals $1,508 per household since President Trump took office for the second time (in after-tax dollars). And as the president does not need reminding, that’s with the congressional elections six months away and the cost of living the voters’ top concern.

As if that were not enough, these same voters, when they fill up their cars, are confronting the costs of Trump’s choice to go to war with Iran, at a national average of $4.52 a gallon — that’s $90.40 for a 20-gallon tank.

Trump has severely, but not fatally, wounded the American renewable energy industry, which is falling further behind China. At the same time, he is doling out tax dollars by the millions to keep dilapidated coal-fired power plants open.

That’s Edsall’s introduction. The rest of his article adds detail upon disgusting detail.

What’s it all about? According to one expert, Leah Stokes, a professor at the University of California-Santa Barbara, it’s all about the Benjamins:

The big story here is corruption. Trump is doing the bidding of the fossil fuel industry and enriching his friends because they got him elected.

I cannot fathom why else he’s keeping open these old, dirty, expensive coal plants that were otherwise slated to close in places like Michigan. Someone is getting very rich off these decisions, and everyday Americans are paying the price.

That’s how it is with Agent 47, who has inverted John F. Kennedy’s exhortation from his inaugural address: “Ask not what your country can do for you — ask what you can do for your country.” Agent 47’s revision: “Ask not what you can do for your country – grasp greedily for all your country provide for you.”

Well into the article, Edsall reports:

...not only is the United States falling way behind China on energy, but that the United States is becoming increasingly dependent on China. As a result, Atlas continued:

The strength of Chinese manufacturing and innovation in many parts of the clean energy supply chain, including battery components and solar components, means countries are increasingly reliant on China.

Policies that discourage clean energy manufacturing and deployment in the United States risk weakening the country’s position in the global clean energy supply chain, creating space for China to consolidate its market leadership.

As the old saying goes, with friends like this, who needs enemies. To quote that great philosopher, Pogo the Possum, “We have met the enemy and he is us.”

Edsall’s list of depredations and stupidities goes on and on. Here’s another:

A key element of Trump’s reward to oil companies for their contribution to his and other Republican campaigns has been his effort to cripple the electric vehicle industry.

In doing so, Trump is trashing free-market principles treasured by traditional conservative Republicans. He has adopted a MAGA industrial policy that goes beyond government propping up one group of special interests to include a deliberate effort to snuff out competing industries.

Julie McNamara, federal energy policy director at the Union of Concerned Scientists, wrote by email that Trump, simply on the basis of personal grievances and political ideology, “is ceding opportunity after opportunity for the U.S. to be a leader in the global clean energy transition, and all the benefits such leadership can afford.”

Edsall’s conclusion:

Where does all this leave the country?

Stuck with a president committed to policies that amount to national self-sabotage, a man driven by personal grievance and reckless promises to campaign contributors, devoid of any real concern for America’s long-term energy needs.

The power of the Presidency has allowed Trump to become a prisoner of his appetites and grievances.

The Scramble in the Middle East: The times they are a changin'

The New Middle East | Robert Wright & Annelle Sheline

0:00 Teaser
1:06 Annelle’s Middle East bona fides
2:55 The state of play in Iran
8:14 A deepening fissure between Gulf Arab states
22:05 Explaining the Trump-Biden continuity on Middle East policy
26:45 Will the Middle East realign away from America?
34:46 Turkey and the moral hazard of US aid to Israel
40:00 Can Iran mend ties with the Gulf states?
47:40 Heading to Overtime

Trump’s transactional view of the world

David French, True Believers Blow Trump’s Mind, NYTimes, May 7, 2026.

At the core of Trump’s worldview is a belief that the world is a fundamentally transactional place, and that everyone has a price.

The Republican Party has done nothing to disabuse him of the notion. Even the religious leaders around him are fundamentally transactional. As they’ve demonstrated, they’ll put up with virtually any behavior from Trump so long as he delivers on a few, simple promises. And now — especially when it comes to abortion — he doesn’t even have to deliver on those. For some it seems as if access to power alone is compensation enough. Sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter Get expert analysis of the news and a guide to the big ideas shaping the world every weekday morning. Get it sent to your inbox.

The key to Trump’s power isn’t just that he accurately sensed that much of the Republican establishment paid lip service to principle but really cared about power — it’s that he knew millions upon millions of voters possessed similar values. Their commitments to character or ideology took a back seat to the simple desire to defeat their opponents. The most important thing was to win. Anything else was a luxury.

And, in a strange way, they appreciated him for his brazenness. In this cynical view, all politicians are, deep down, just like Trump. They were faking their dedication to principle. As for Trump, he was the honest crook. He was like the mob boss who didn’t insult our intelligence by pretending to be in the sanitation business.

Like calls out to like, and over time Trump has built one of the most purely transactional coalitions in politics. It should surprise no one that prosperity gospel pastors were among the first Christians to answer Trump’s call. Their entire religion is transactional — with God dispensing health and wealth in direct response to the financial donations of the faithful.

Nor should we be surprised that such a substantial proportion of the nation’s tech moguls found their way to MAGA. Forget culture, their politics are downstream of commerce, and Trump has promised crypto and A.I. riches to all those who fall in line behind him.

Alas, Trump is wrong about that:

Not everyone is transactional. Some people — for better and for worse — actually have beliefs that they’re willing to die for, and Trump is painfully, obviously baffled when he encounters belief like that.

It’s embarrassing, for example, to watch him flail his way through the Iran war, shifting strategies, objectives and timelines sometimes by the day. It’s obvious that he thought Iran would be another Venezuela. In Venezuela, he was able to capture the leader and then more or less bend the remaining regime elements to his will, at least for now.

But in Iran, he helped Israel decapitate virtually all of the nation’s senior leadership, and the rest of the regime seems to have become more intransigent and less willing to negotiate. Even worse, he also seems to have enabled the most fanatical elements of the regime — the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps — rather than the slightly more moderate clerics.

In response, Trump plays the only cards he knows how to play — alternating between threatening death and destruction and proposing business deals.

And then:

Ukraine’s zealous defense of its own liberty and independence is heroic and deeply virtuous. So is Denmark’s defense of its own sovereignty in the face of Trump’s bullying. In fact, much of Western Europe was transactional with Trump until they realized the price of dealing with Trump was simply too high to pay.

They thought they could hunker down and weather another Trump term, but he created a crisis so grave that Europe had to stand if it wanted to preserve any shred of dignity and independence.

The pope’s steadfast adherence to Catholic doctrine is yet another example. One gets the sense that he’s almost amused at the idea that Trump’s bellicose rhetoric should have any influence at all on his public professions of Christian faith.

The messiness of American politics:

One of the most fascinating aspects of the last 10 years of American political life has been the way that Trump has exposed layers of differences in American life beyond right versus left. In fact, in many ways right versus left has been the least consequential aspect of the American divide. The Republican Party bears little ideological resemblance to the G.O.P. of even the very recent past.

Instead, it’s been between decent and indecent. Honest and dishonest. Transactional and principled.

There's more at the link.

The White House endorses research on psychedelics

Andrew Jacobs, A Long, Strange Trip: How the G.O.P. Came to Embrace Psychedelic Drugs, NYTimes, May 3, 2026.

Mindbending may be just the word to describe the Oval Office ceremony on April 18, when President Trump ordered federal agencies to speed up research into the potential therapeutic uses of illegal psychedelic compounds like LSD, peyote and MDMA.

Here was a law-and-order Republican and lifelong teetotaler championing the hallucinogenic substances that a previous Republican president, Richard Nixon, had condemned as “public enemy No. 1.” [...]

Mr. Trump’s bold efforts to soften the federal government’s stance on certain illegal drugs have been head-spinning — last month, the Justice Department, at the president’s behest, loosened restrictions on medical marijuana, too.

But experts in the field are not entirely surprised.

They note a steady easing of public opposition to psychedelics in recent years, much of it shaped by research that has chipped away at the stigma by demonstrating the drugs’ potential to treat intractable mental health conditions like post-traumatic stress disorder, depression and substance abuse.

There's much more at the link.

Presiding over a declining America, Trump hastens the descent

Two from today's (May 3, 2026) New York Times. First, China is on the rise and ready to move beyond America. Then we have the decline of the American empire.

China Rising

Jacob Dreyer, Trump Is Coming to a China That Has Moved On, NYTimes, May 3, 2023.

Deng Xiaoping, the former Chinese leader, once said: “If China wants to be rich and strong, it needs America.” But this isn’t the same country that once looked to a U.S. president’s visit as a moment of global validation. It is a country where the realization has dawned that it may have learned all it can from America and has begun to chart its own course.

This was bound to happen as China grew stronger and richer. But Mr. Trump has accelerated this shift. China’s people have watched with a mix of fascination and revulsion as the president — through his abortive tariff wars, the war with Iran and callow allegiance to financial markets — has completed America’s transformation from a model to emulate to a troublesome distraction to be managed. With sinking approval ratings and potential losses awaiting in the midterm elections, Mr. Trump will arrive in Beijing a more diminished figure in Chinese eyes than perhaps any visiting U.S. president. Sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter Get expert analysis of the news and a guide to the big ideas shaping the world every weekday morning. Get it sent to your inbox.

This matters, both for the visit itself and for the future of the relationship between the two countries. China’s leaders, aware of Mr. Trump’s weakness and perfidy, are unlikely to strike any meaningful bargains with him. His actions strengthen China’s Communist-ruled system at home by making it look superior by comparison.

Many Chinese people increasingly view the United States less as the lodestar it once was and more as a cautionary tale. Popular sentiment in China is of course state-managed, but it resonates because it mirrors what the Chinese see for themselves. I hear it in daily conversations: Chinese friends who return from America with tales of homelessness, dilapidation and political rancor, which contrast sharply with China’s clean and safe cities, gleaming infrastructure and political stability.

After a couple of paragraphs acknowledging that many Chinese “worry that China isn’t ready to fill [America’s] shoes” in the world and acknowledging that “China, after all, has its own problems,” Dreyer moves on:

Still, there is a clear sense about the need to move past America. Mr. Trump will be gone in two years, but Mr. Xi can rule for as long as he wants and has laid out ambitious plans that are likely to survive him. Those plans include a China that is at the center of new types of energy, the use of data and technologies like artificial intelligence for urban management, the delivery of public services, cheaper health care and better access to education. Chinese people also see that the world is increasingly open to adopting Chinese technology, products, investment and other solutions, maybe even its governance ideas.

There's more at the link.

An Empire in Decline

Christopher Caldwell, America Is Officially an Empire in Decline, NYTimes, May 3, 2023.

The American-Israeli attack on Iran was more than a bad idea; it has turned into a watershed in the decline of the American empire. Some might prefer the word “hegemony” to describe the world order the United States leads, since its flag does not generally fly over the lands it protects or exploits. But the rules are the same: Imperial systems, whatever you call them, last only as long as their means are adequate to their ends. And with the Iran war, President Trump has overextended the empire dangerously.

A Middle Eastern military misadventure is one of the last ways a casual observer would have expected Mr. Trump’s presidency to go wrong. The problems he alluded to in all three of his presidential campaigns had mostly resulted from our leaders’ governing beyond their means. At home, proponents of wokeness underestimated the costs and difficulties of micromanaging interactions between groups. Abroad, the mighty American armed forces proved to have no particular talent for democracy promotion, and there was the recent debacle in Iraq to prove it. Overextension was a danger that President Joe Biden contemptuously dismissed. “We’re the United States of America,” he used to say, “and there’s nothing we can’t do.”

Mr. Trump, people thought, would be different. For all the grandiosity of the expression “Make America great again,” Trump voters did not expect him to take on new problems. The greatness would be mostly atmospheric — braggadocio, not adventurism. The United States could become greater even if it withdrew to a less expansive sphere of influence. When he proclaimed an updated Monroe Doctrine, refocusing American attention on the Western Hemisphere, retrenchment was what most people thought they were getting. In last November’s National Security Strategy, he added, “The days in which the Middle East dominated American foreign policy in both long-term planning and day-to-day execution are thankfully over.”

And yet here we are, ankle-deep in a Middle Eastern quagmire, one that Trump himself laid the groundwork for when he withdrew from Obama’s Iran nuclear agreement (Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, aka JCPOA) in his first term. After two paragraphs in which Caldwell sketches out how Netanyahu suckered Trump into this quagmire, Caldwell has a paragraph in which he sketches out a parallel “with Britain a century ago: deindustrializing, overcommitted, complacent.” He concludes:

Mr. Trump was the perfect candidate for Americans who suspected something had gone wrong with their elites. His argument, basically, was that American-led globalism was so beneficial to politicians that once in power, they would defend it even against their voters, no matter what they said while campaigning. Events, alas, have proved him right.

Suckered again.

Perhaps Ukraine has replaced America as leader of the free world

David French, Meet the New Leader of the Free World, NYTimes, Apr. 26, 2026.

A remarkable thing has happened on the world’s battlefields. Ukraine — a nation that was supposed to dissolve within days of a Russian invasion — has fought Russia to a stalemate, revolutionizing land warfare in the process. It has become an indispensable security partner in the western alliance, including in the war against Iran.

Now, Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine’s president, is taking the next step, one that would have been unthinkable even as recently as 2024. By word and deed, he’s showing Europe and the world how the post-American free world can preserve its liberty and independence. This is what happens when, as Phillips Payson O’Brien wrote in a piece for The Atlantic, “Kyiv appears to have given up on the United States.”

If that is true — and it looks as though it is — it may be worse news for the United States than it is for Ukraine.

Events on the ground and in world capitals are moving so quickly that it’s hard to keep up. First, the strategic situation in the Ukraine war seems to have changed. Last week, Mick Ryan, a retired Australian major general and one of the most astute analysts of the war, wrote that Ukraine has largely stabilized the frontline in eastern Ukraine, deepened its coalition, isolated Russia diplomatically and developed an indigenous arms industry that makes it less dependent on external support.

It’s no longer accurate to think of Ukraine as a desperate underdog; it’s becoming an independent power. Even as it fights for its life against Russia, it’s reportedly reaching defense deals with the Gulf states and with the United States — and this time it’s Ukraine that’s providing military assistance.

In February 2025, Donald Trump mocked Zelensky in the Oval Office. “You’re not in a good position. You don’t have the cards right now,” Trump said. In April 2026, Ukraine has enough cards left that it’s sharing them.

This might be difficult for many readers to grasp — given our nation’s longstanding military supremacy — but the largest and most battle-hardened land force in the western world may well be the Ukrainian Army. While the precise numbers are classified, the Atlantic Council estimated in 2025 that Ukraine had roughly a million men and women under arms, the vast majority of whom serve in the ground forces.

America’s total force is larger than Ukraine’s, but to put the size of Ukrainian land forces in perspective, the combined size of the U.S. Army and Marine Corps is around 620,000. It’s also worth noting that the U.S. forces have much less combat experience than Ukraine forces — especially when it comes to combat with a great power.

There's more at the link.

A case for regulating AI

Paul Ford, Can an A.I. Company Ever Be Good? NYTimes, Apr. 26, 2026.

Artificial intelligence can be wondrous, but the technology underneath is more than a little monstrous. It eats up all the words in the world, from blogs to books, often without permission. It burns whole forests’ worth of energy, digesting that raw material into its models, and gulps billions of gallons of water to cool down. These are the same qualities we perceive in Godzilla, but distributed. Is it any wonder that the Japanese word “kaiju,” or strange beast, has “AI” smack in the middle?

Mere greed didn’t get us here. In fact, ethics did. The big A.I. labs’ starry-eyed founders believed that the only way to stop the looming threat of a superintelligence that might kill us all was to create an aligned A.I. that would remain fond of humans. A friendly Godzilla could stop bad Godzillas before they got to Tokyo Bay.

Lessons of recent history:

Over three decades of watching the tech industry and watching big companies grow from tiny teams to global powers, I’ve observed the same pattern: Ethics don’t scale up. Tech companies like to start with a mission. Google wanted to connect the world’s information; Microsoft wanted to put a computer on every desktop; Twitter wanted to give all people a platform to publish their thoughts. These are good ideas — the stuff of TED Talks. But users show up with their own beliefs and ideas, by the millions. As a tech founder, you end up putting enormous work into making users behave (and stopping them from breaking the law). Lawsuits pour in, saying you did wrong, some because you’re a convenient target.

All the while, money keeps gushing in. You start out transparent, sharing your journey, but then before an initial public offering of shares, you must honor the S.E.C.-mandated quiet period and restrict promotional communications. After that, the transparency never quite returns. The market demands a rising stock price. Your company still makes a lot of software, but a huge amount of time goes to tax strategy and compliance.

At that scale, people start to blur together, and human users can become aggregate pools of statistics and growth vectors that go up and down — a mulch into which you plant your products.

The entire culture of American technology is built around two terms: disruption and, of course, scale. But ethics are constraints on disruption and scale. Truly ethics-bound organizations — the U.S. justice system, the American Medical Association, the Catholic priesthood — have hard scaling limits. Their rules run deep, and their requirements to serve are so onerous that only a few people can do the job. Punishments for transgressors include losing their licenses, being defrocked and being disbarred. Software industry people might have good degrees and are often good people, but they are making it up as they go along. They take no oath, are inconsistently certified and can only be fired, not exiled from the trade.

What to do? Regulate:

But regulation is absolutely in the interests of both America and the big A.I. companies themselves. Let me add two more terms people should know: “Google zero” and “model collapse.” Google zero (coined by Nilay Patel, the editor in chief of The Verge) is when Google stops sending traffic to websites and just provides an A.I. answer instead. When that happens, websites get less traffic, sell fewer ads and make less money. As a result, they may not be able to produce as much content. Model collapse is related: It’s when the A.I. models run out of knowledge to digest. What then? Do they excrete their own prose to redigest? Do they just give up?

Silicon Valley types like to say that data is the new oil. I think that’s right in two ways: Data is valuable, but it’s also a commodity, and these new A.I. tools are infrastructure. We regulate the electric grid, so why not these?

In this new world, there are so many new things to regulate: Deepfakes, A.I. liability, copyright rules, model bias concerns and ecological costs top the list. And we will also need to protect the digital commons and incentivize people to write and do things online.

There’s more at the link.

Moving Beyond Trump to a Brave New World

Some Young People Think No Kings Is Old News, NYTimes, April 24, 2026.

On April 14 Thomas B. Edsall published an op-ed entitled, Why Aren’t the Kids Out Protesting Against Trump?. It provoked a number of interesting responses. Here is one of them:

To the Editor:

Re “Why Aren’t the Kids Out Protesting Against Trump?,” by Thomas B. Edsall (Opinion guest essay, nytimes.com, April 14):

As a Gen Z participant in No Kings who has been dismayed to find myself quite alone, demographically speaking, at each protest, I have thought long and hard about how this came to be. I believe that Mr. Edsall’s essay accurately underscores many of the contributing factors. Here are two more to consider.

First, the protests evoke an America that my generation feels we don’t know. The No Kings movement centers largely on the idea of restoration — of democratic principles, political normalcy and American decency. Gen Z, having come of age in the Trump era of political discord and the erosion of democracy, has hardly known any of these things.

Second, precisely because the No Kings protests evoke the past, they fail to appeal to our appetite for change. Young people by nature desire to reform, rectify, reshape. We want to tear down the existing structures we deem unjust and build better ones in their place. To stand against apartheid, sexual harassment or police brutality is to dismantle the present and construct the future.

While the notion of restoration is a noble one, it simply does not motivate people my age in the same way the promise of radical change does. It implies a return to the status quo, and for a generation that considers the status quo one of great injustice, it is fundamentally unpalatable.

Juliana Birkenkamp Boulder, Colo.

I understand that response. A year ago I, when the depredations of the second Trump administration were becoming obvious, I published an article in 3 Quarks Daily, Why I am a Patriot: Vietnam, the Draft, Mennonites, and Project Apollo. That title alone makes Ms. Birkenkamp's point. Here are my opening paragraphs:

Sometime in the past two weeks I found myself feeling patriotic in a way I don’t remember ever having felt before. I accounted for this feeling by invoking that old adage, “you don’t recognize what you have until you lose it.” The current federal administration has stolen my country from me. The America to which I pledged allegiance every morning in primary and secondary school, that America is being pillaged, plundered, and sold off for parts to greedy megalomaniacs and oligarchs.

Now that the nation is being destroyed, I realize that I’ve been bound to America my entire adult life. If I hadn’t felt those bonds before – except perhaps for a moment in the mid-1980s when I played “The Star Spangled Banner” for 25,000 bikers at Americade in Lake George, me alone on my trumpet, without the rest of the band – that’s because I’d taken the idea of America for granted. To invoke another cliché, just as the fish is oblivious to the water in which it swims, so I was not consciously aware of the freedom and dignity, of the liberty and justice for all, which made our national life possible.

I understand her second point as well, and share it. I don't want to return to the world of my youth. That's gone, forever. I want to move forward. Just how we are to do that, that is not at all clear to me. The best I can manage at the moment is to imagine where we might be over a century in the future. Here's a glimpse of what might be: Kisangani 2150: Homo Ludens Rising, A Working Paper. Here is the abstract from that paper:

The advancement of AI offers us the choice between contrasting paradigms for organizing human life: Homo Economicus (where work is the defining activity) and Homo Ludens (where play is the defining activity). Drawing on Johan Huizinga's work and Kim Stanley Robinson's speculative fiction, I propose that humanity faces a critical juncture as AI increasingly dominates economic production. The document develops a theoretical framework for a "Fourth Arena" of existence-beyond matter, life, and human culture-that emerges through human-AI interaction. Through speculative narrative (first section) and philosophical dialogue with Claude 3.7 (second and third sections), I argue that play, rather than economic utility, will become the defining characteristic of human value and meaning in an automated future. As AI systems assume utilitarian functions, humanity's capacity for non-instrumental play becomes increasingly central to our identity and contribution. The manuscript represents preliminary work toward a larger project titled The Fourth Arena: Homo Ludens Rising, which envisions play as the essential bridge into a post-economic society where human flourishing transcends productivity-based value systems.

People are beginning to sour on AI (and how!)

Ezra Klein, produced by Annie Galvin, Why Are Palantir and OpenAI Scared of Alex Bores? NYTimes, April 21, 2026.

From the introduction:

If you are living in New York’s 12th Congressional District, you may have seen these endless attacks on Alex Bores, one of the Democrats running there.

Yikes. Bores did work for Palantir. The rest of that attack is not what you might call true, but what interests me is who is paying for it: the super PAC Leading the Future and its subsidiary Think Big.

Who funds the super PAC Leading the Future? Well, among their largest donors are the co-founders of OpenAI, Andreessen Horowitz and — wait for it — Palantir.

So why is a co-founder of Palantir, Joe Lonsdale, in this case, funding a super PAC to try to destroy a candidate on the grounds that he once worked for Palantir? The reason is that Leading the Future is a super PAC dedicated to destroying anyone who might regulate the tech industry, in general, or A.I., specifically, in a way these funders don’t like.

And Bores is a member of the New York State Assembly. He co-wrote and passed the RAISE Act, one of the first pieces of A.I. regulation passed in any major state.

From deep in the discussion:

Klein: Have you thought about the change in public opinion? Because it looks to me like we’re seeing a pretty powerful A.I. backlash rising.

You have polls showing now that more Americans are worried about A.I. than are enthusiastic about it. There’s a lot of counter-data center energy playing out throughout the country.

What have you made of how quickly the politics have shifted beneath A.I.?

Bores: That surprised me. Both how many people have focused on it, but also how bipartisan it has remained.

You, of all people, know about polarization — and most issues end up polarized. This one hasn’t so far. It has resisted that longer than I thought it would.

If you talk to voters, across Republicans, Democrats and independents, you see pretty similar attitudes; across state legislators, pretty similar attitudes; even in Congress, there’s more bipartisanship than you would think.

Surveys regularly show that about 10 percent of people want to put the A.I. genie back in the bottle, to pretend it never existed. I empathize, but I don’t think that’s the way forward. Ten percent of people represented by the super PAC Leading the Future want to just let it rip.

That is the super PAC that’s attacking you.

Yes. They want to just let it rip. They don’t care how many people it hurts, just how fast it moves.

Eighty percent of Americans see some benefits. But they also see a lot of risk and think it’s moving too fast and want to have some say in its development. The fact that it has stayed so bipartisan has surprised me, and also the fact that it has risen up in people’s minds so much has surprised me.

Has the pessimism around it surprised you? We were talking earlier about the period when there was a lot of optimism about tech, about software, about the internet.

I think you can really look from early computers, the early internet, all the way pretty late into the social media era.

Probably around Trump things begin to turn — Cambridge Analytica, algorithmic feeds. But that’s a long time when these systems and technologies are present for people, and there’s a fundamental optimism about them.

A.I. — ChatGPT, I think, is when this really burst into public consciousness. It’s 2023. We’re here in 2026, and the polling has already turned negative. The week before we recorded this, Sam Altman was targeted in two separate violent attacks. There was a Molotov cocktail thrown at his home.

Awful.

Two other people shot at his door.

I was a little shocked to see people celebrating these attacks online, saying: Where can we support the bail fund?

Yes.

This has moved into fury and fear and pessimism really, really quickly. Why do you think that is?

Well, there was a separate split in A.I. around capabilities. The debate used to be: Is this real or is it stochastic parrots? But usually, even before that: Is it just slop that is never going to actually replace a human?

Fancy autocomplete.

Exactly. Exactly. We had these debates on one dimension, which was: Is it good for people? Is it bad for people?

And then there was this other dimension: How big of an impact is it going to have? And I think that debate has collapsed. People are not skeptical of its power anymore — or some are, but fewer and fewer each day.

The intensity with which we’re having that first debate has really ramped up. But I think it has also been that we saw what happened with social media.

We saw what happened with these previous revolutions that were supposed to change everything for the better. We’ve seen platforms established with great promise, and then over time, once they get power, really turn on their users.

People are no longer willing to believe the story that is told about a technology or a platform always benefiting people. You see this argument from some of the A.I. founders. They say: Well, it will create material abundance for everyone. There will be no more poverty. Everyone will have everything.

And everyone is looking around saying: Of course, that’s not what’s going to happen. You’re a private company — you’re going to profit, you’re going to keep it all for yourself.

Sam Altman recently said it will be like a utility. But utilities are really highly regulated.

People are just not willing to believe that spin anymore, and yet they’re seeing changes in their lives really quickly.

Tossing the Tech Bros out of the White House

First we had Christ tossing the money changers out of the temple, now Robbie the Robot is going to town on the Tech Bros.

Ezra Klein and Fareed Zakaria discuss the moral degeneracy of Donald Trump and what that’s doing to America.

Ezra Klein and Annie Galvin, The Civilization Trump Destroys May Be Our Own, NYTimes, Apr. 10, 2026.

Here's the beginning of the interview:

Ezra Klein: Fareed Zakaria, welcome back to the show.

Fareed Zakaria: Always a pleasure.

I want to start with Trump’s now infamous post on Truth Social on Tuesday morning, when he wrote: “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.”

What did you think when you saw that?

I was horrified. But it goes beyond that.

It felt like that tweet was the culmination of something that had been going on for a while — which was that the president of the United States was simply abandoning the entire moral weight that the United States had brought to its world role ever since World War II.

Not to sound too corny about it, because, of course, we made mistakes, and we were hypocritical and all that, but compared to every other power that gained this kind of enormous dominance, the U.S. had been different.

After 1945, it said: We’re not going to be another imperial hegemon. We’re not going to ask for reparations from the countries that we defeated. We’re actually going to try to build them, and we’re going to give them foreign aid.

That whole idea that the United States saw itself as different, saw itself not as one more in the train of great imperial powers — which, when it was their turn, decided to act rapaciously, to extract tribute, to enforce a brutal vision of dominance — all that was, in a sense, thrown away.

I realize it was just one tweet, but it was the culmination of something Trump has been doing for a long time.

It just left me very sad to think that the United States, this country that has really been so distinctive in its world mission — a country that I looked up to as a kid and came to as an immigrant — that its leader could threaten to annihilate an entire people.

And when you say something like that, it sounds very abstract: “civilization.” What we are talking about is the life and aspirations and culture and dignity of a whole people. You’re talking about 93 million people.

One thing that has always felt core about the moral challenge that Donald Trump and his view of geopolitics poses is it feels, to me, on a deep level, like a throwback to the 18th, 19th, early 20th century, when individual human lives were just understood as pawns in the greater game of dominance and strength and rivalries and conquests.

I’m not saying that there has not been disrespect or disregard for human life in the postwar era. That would be absurd.

But there was a commitment and a structure of values in which you didn’t threaten mass annihilation of civilians simply because you were trying to salvage face in a war you had started for no reason and were losing.

You see this in DOGE and its approach to U.S.A.I.D. — that there is something about how you treat or don’t treat, how you weigh or don’t weigh, the lives and futures of the people who are caught within your machinations and that he just wipes away, as a kind of weakness or liberal piety.

If you watch or listen to George W. Bush when he is essentially losing the war in Iraq, what is striking is the difference. Bush, for all his flaws — and he made many, many mistakes in Iraq — always looked at it as an essentially idealistic, aspirational mission.

We were trying to help the Iraqis. He never demeaned Islam. He always tried to see this as part of America’s great uplifting mission.

You almost miss that because, even in our mistakes, even in our errors, there was always that sense that we were trying to help this country do better, we were trying to help these people do better.

What you are describing, quite accurately, is that Trump approaches it not just from the point of view of the 19th century — because sometimes people talk about how he loves McKinley, and he liked tariffs, and he’s like McKinley in that imperialism.

No, Trump is more like a rapacious 18th-century European imperialist. McKinley said he went to the Philippines because he wanted to Christianize the place. There was none of that sense of uplift. Most of it was just brutal.

As you say, the individual was never at the center of it. Human life and dignity were never at the center of it. It was all a self-interested, short-term, extractive game. And Trump is hearkening back to that.

It’s interesting to ask where he gets it from. Because it really is probably fair to say that nobody else on the American political spectrum, if they were president, would speak like that. I don’t think JD Vance would speak like that. I don’t think Marco Rubio would speak like that.

There’s something that he brings to it — which is a callousness and a contempt for any expression of those values. For him, that’s all a sign of weakness, that’s the kind of [expletive] people say. But the reality is that’s the way he looks at the world.

It goes on from there.

Cosmic Waffles and Looney Tunes in the house that Trump built

Richard FAusset, No One at Waffle House Remembers FEMA Official Who Says He Teleported In, NYTimes, April 3, 2026.

In December, Mr. Phillips, 65, a former top health official in Texas, was appointed to head FEMA’s Office of Response and Recovery. The office, with more than 1,000 employees and a budget of nearly $300 million, is central to FEMA’s job of responding to disasters like hurricanes, earthquakes and fires. Mr. Phillips was known, at the time, as a proponent of election fraud conspiracy theories, some of which were amplified by Mr. Trump.

Things got stickier for Mr. Phillips last month, when an investigative report by CNN detailed how, on podcasts and social media, he had propagated other conspiracy theories, used violent rhetoric in discussing former President Joseph R. Biden, and recounted how, on two occasions, he had somehow found himself being moved, by forces beyond his control, dozens of miles from two different starting points in Georgia.

“Teleporting is no fun,” he said on the podcast “Onward,” which is hosted by a conservative activist. [...]

On Wednesday, Mr. Phillips wrote on Truth Social, President Trump’s social media platform, that the incident took place while he was heavily medicated as part of a cancer treatment. But he also described it as a miracle performed by God.

“The word ‘teleportation’ was not mine,” Mr. Phillips wrote. “It was used by someone else in the conversation reaching for language to describe something with no easy name. The more accurate biblical terms are ‘translated’ or ‘transported’ — not new ideas for people of faith.”

But no one at any of the three Waffle Houses recognized his picture.

That's nothing. I once toured a waffle in an X-wing fighter from the Star Wars universe. See:

We are not alone:

Mr. Phillips’s claims are part of a growing trend among high-profile American conservatives to assert the physical presence of beings from the spiritual realm, or from provinces that are often reserved for science fiction novelists. In 2024, Tucker Carlson, the former Fox News host, said that he was “mauled,” while sleeping, by “​​a demon or by something unseen.” Former Representative Matt Gaetz recently said that a U.S. Army official had told him about “hybrid breeding programs, where captured aliens were breeding with humans to create some hybrid race that could engage in intergalactic communication.”

The hegemon no longer, the USA as one nation among others

I've long thought that the situation of the post-Soviet collapse, with the USA as the dominant hegemon in the world, I've long thought that situation was unstable, a mistake. For one thing, it forces the USA to devote a huge chunk of its national resources to the military-industrial complex, which amounts to burying that wealth in the sand. There are better things to do with those resources, both here and abroad. And it forces other nations into perpetual obsequiousness, which is undignified.

But, how do we get out of that situation? The answer seems to be: Trump. In the process of attempting to enforce America's will on the world, that is, Trump's will, he's forcing other nations to abandon us and stand up for themselves.

Ana Swanson, Rival Nations Seize On Choke Points to Counter Trump, NYTimes, Apr. 2, 2026.

President Trump has unapologetically wielded the power of the United States on the global stage, taking a much more belligerent approach economically and militarily to try to dictate the actions of other countries.

From high tariffs to the war with Iran, Mr. Trump has claimed that this aggressive behavior internationally has only upsides, and that past leaders were fools for refusing to tap into America’s power.

But one clear drawback of the strategy is emerging. While many countries have acceded to the president’s demands, some have found a highly effective new way to fight back. Mr. Trump’s aggression has given them the opportunity to test their control over choke points, threatening the United States and the global economy.

One such choke point is the Strait of Hormuz. Iran, which accounts for less than 1 percent of global economic output, has control over the shipping lane that transports a fifth of the world’s oil and gas. Its closure since the United States and Israel began attacking Iran at the end of February has blocked shipments of fuel, fertilizer and other goods, sending gas prices sharply higher and spreading anxiety among U.S. farmers and manufacturers.

Another experiment in retaliatory coercion began one year ago on Thursday, when Mr. Trump walked into the Rose Garden and unveiled tariffs on what he called “Liberation Day.” While many governments — even powerful economies like the European Union — complied with U.S. demands, China was a notable exception. Beijing rolled out a licensing system for exports of rare-earth minerals and magnets that has given China unparalleled control over the global manufacturing system.

Whoops! Maybe the sheer complexity of the existing world system is making Trump's hegemonic dreams utterly impossible. It's like the mythical hydra, chop one head off and three more crop up. Are we actually moving toward a really new world order?

There's more at the link.