Important reminder of the devastation wrought by the Musk/DOGE dismantling of USAID. Hundreds of thousands dead, many more to come. The greatest crime of the 21st century (so far).

The unpopular front

It may be overkill, but you could use basilisk avslab.github.io/basilisk/

Probably not. If the angular velocity vector is slightly offset from the smallest or largest principal axis, it will trace a closed loop around that principal axis. My profile picture shows paths of the angular velocity vector wrt the principal axes for a body with three distinct principal inertias.

America Unbound in the Caribbean The real costs of Washington’s use of force.

Pleased to share my new essay in @foreignaffairs.com on the broader implications of the Trump administration’s killing spree at sea.

www.foreignaffairs.com/central-amer...

👁 1854 / 2025 👁

inasmuch as "what is slop" is a defining question for the current media landscape i think this is kind of the first serious entry? most other analysis is just "it's that AI thing that we hate", but this sort of gets at why we hate it

last time I'm retweeting this post but it did remind me of this quote from John Bingham, America's Forgotten Framer

Every USN vs PLAN encounter after 2032 is like the USS Masculine Warfighter, Glorious Defender of the Cracker Barrel versus six identical copies of the CNS 我们昨天建了这个 supplied by a ship that does nothing but make birthday cakes for the other ships

Francis Fukuyama: ‘The neoliberals went too far. Now, we need more social democratic policies’ The political scientist, who at the beginning of the 1990s declared ‘the end of history,’ returns with a new book where he identifies the threats to classical liberalism: runaway capitalism and too mu...

Francis Fukuyama: ‘The neoliberals went too far. Now, we need more social democratic policies’

english.elpais.com/culture/2022...

Gonna lay down a marker here: if they do in fact rule for Trump here, it will be properly considered Dred Scott II, and will in an important sense mark the end of the Union

Trump Can’t Fix the Deficit by Attacking the Federal Reserve The president claims lower interest rates would save us $1 trillion annually. He’s wrong.

NEW from me. Trump wants to take over the Federal Reserve and lower interest rates in part because he believes it will cut federal budget interest costs by "$1 Trillion per year."

In @thedispatchmedia.bsky.social, I show that fiscal dominance would NOT reduce interest costs very much. 🧵

This is extrajudicial execution, without any clear threat to the US, no authorization from Congress, and far beyond even Article II. The military is not the president's personal hit squad.
Or wasn't, until now.

This is pretty much exactly the outcome predicted by Hannah Arendt in 1948:

I just think it's interesting that there is no Serious Policy Circle in Europe in which anyone would ever call Israel a threat to NATO security even though they're bragging about carrying out military operations against a member state

Booz al’Hamilton.

But the tendency is to interpret the extremity of left-wing views as idealisation (of complex realities) and the extremity of right-wing views as intensity (of sincere feelings). Who cares what those guys think, look at what these guys feel.

The story of the 2020s that will be forever lost by all but the most tiresome, obnoxious historian is that it was a decisive proof of Keynes's most basic claims about the economy and the functions of government in the economy smothered under irresponsible media coverage and Trump's sabotage.

I think a lot about that one Biden speech from that period and how diametrically opposed to his later views. Biden spoke then exactly how I feel now youtu.be/MZs8Qj8QuRc

Federal Reserve Bank of Avignon incoming at Mach 5

I’m interested!

This is mathematically almost identical to the yaw flip sun-constrained nadir pointed satellites perform during eclipse (like the Galileo maneuver you posted about a few days ago)