“Gambling with our lives,” warned departing Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon. Now Dario Amodei writes, “We must slow the pace.” The people building powerful minds are warning that their ability to control them may not keep up.
I remain an apocaloptimist.
Krystal Polk’s family has owned its Southaven land for generations. Now, she tells Scientific American, company representatives question relatives near the property, and the family carries tax records to establish that it belongs there. Across the road stands the power plant feeding Elon Musk’s AI ambitions.
20 years ago I said I didn't think "fascism was knocking at the door" but there I was last night, against my better judgment, flipping among news stations and still somehow shocked by what is happening. My mind oscillates between cynical helplessness and dissociation. One says nothing I do matters. The other suggests I can protect myself by not looking too closely. Neither is a durable civic posture.
Ronald Reagan’s A Time for Choosing still has moral force because it names a real danger:
America has real emergencies to manage. Fake war and fake voter fraud are distractions from real climate and real democracy emergencies.
Imagine an old orange man standing before a carefully engineered bridge. It is not beautiful. It is not eternal. It has weak points, compromises, warning signs, and inspection schedules. But it spans the river. It keeps people from drowning.
The old man does not like the bridge because someone else built it. So he blows it up.
Propaganda does not bend the moral field. It bends perception of the field.
That distinction matters because authoritarian politics always begins by confusing language with reality. Power renames cruelty and mistakes the new name for moral transformation. It calls domination order, censorship neutrality, corruption loyalty, and fear patriotism. It learns to manipulate the visible surface of things and then concludes, stupidly, that the underlying structure has changed.
Tomorrow, I am announcing my campaign for President of the United States.
I am running because I believe America is ready for a new kind of politics. A politics that is practical, patriotic, pro-worker, and pro-family. A politics that is rooted in a simple, foundational truth: we are all in this together.
That idea has a name: AF1FA — All For One, For All. (Donate at AF1FA.com!)
History teaches that a small minority of people will follow corruption all the way down. They will excuse it, normalize it, translate it into partisan language, and eventually retreat into the laziest defense available: both sides do it. Examples abound, but the pattern is always the same: minimize, rationalize, compare, forget.
TЯump‘s D.C. building spree is not about beauty. It is about possession.
I have made jokes before about TЯump's fake masculinity: the makeup, the shoe-lift rumors, the girdle and Spanx jokes, the whole costume of dominance wrapped around one of the neediest public men in American life.
Fossil fuels impose a threefold tax on civilization: they destabilize the climate, empower geopolitical coercion, and corrode democracy—while a green transition offers the only credible path to resilience, sovereignty, and long-term national strength.
I really believe Trump is wagging the dog with Iran to distract from Epstein.
It is worth stating something plainly because people often assume political views appear fully formed. They rarely do. Mine certainly didn’t.
Today Marco Rubio walked up to the microphones and delivered what might be the cleanest example of Orwellian doublethink you can fit into a single sentence: the United States struck Iran “pre-emptively” because we believed Israel was going to strike first, and Iran would retaliate against U.S. forces—so we hit them before they hit us. In other words, the “imminent threat” was the retaliation expected after the attack we expected.
Read that again slowly.
When I was a graduate student at UF, I didn’t set out to become a “politics and religion” guy. I set out to restart a student group that had gone dormant, because it felt unhealthy—intellectually and civically—to let “religion” be treated as the default, unquestioned atmosphere.