Kerry Propper

[Barham Salih @BarhamSalih]

As Yom Kippur begins, I extend my warmest wishes to all observing.
May this sacred day bring reflection, renewal and peace to you and your loved ones. Its timeless values of compassion, humility and forgiveness are needed now more than ever. G'mar Chatimah Tovah.

[The Kobeissi Letter @KobeissiLetter]

The US debt crisis is entering uncharted territory:

Net interest, social security, medicare, healthcare spending, and veterans' benefits currently consume 98.4% of total federal government receipts, near the highest proportion on record.

This figure has surged +28 percentage points since 2022 and is only below the 2020 pandemic peak of ~99.0%.

Net interest alone has nearly tripled as a % of revenue, to a record 19.7%, accounting for roughly half of that +28 percentage-point increase.

By comparison, during the 2008 Financial Crisis, these expenditures did not exceed 90% of federal receipts.

In other words, mandatory spending and interest costs now consume nearly every Dollar the federal government collects.

What is the long-term plan here?

[SightBringer @_The_Prophet__]

⚡️The chart is not telling me teenagers suddenly lost IQ.

It is telling me civilization has started consuming the cognitive substrate required to express intelligence.

The hidden variable is attention.

Reading, mathematics, and science all require the same underlying machinery: hold a problem in working memory, tolerate confusion, resist distraction, build a representation over time, then reason inside it.

Modern childhood increasingly trains the opposite loop:

stimulus → reaction → novelty → stimulus → reaction → novelty

Short video, notifications, algorithmic feeds, constant task-switching, reduced long-form reading, less boredom, less unstructured thought. The brain adapts to the environment it repeatedly inhabits.

So the frightening possibility is not “kids are genetically becoming stupider.”

It is:

we are taking perfectly capable brains and training them into cognitive shallowness during the years when attentional architecture is being built.

That would explain why reading gets hit especially hard. Reading is almost pure sustained internal simulation. Nothing moves. Nothing rewards you every three seconds. You must manufacture the world inside your own head.

And the pandemic looks more like an accelerant than the origin. The decline was already forming before it. COVID then removed structure, normalized screens further, damaged attendance, and widened learning gaps.

The next phase may be even stranger because AI removes another layer of cognitive friction.

Previously, a student who did not understand something had to wrestle with it.

Now the answer can appear immediately.

That is incredibly useful, but struggle itself is part of how cognition gets built.

So the deepest risk is not AI making people less intelligent.

It is humans progressively outsourcing the exact cognitive operations that used to develop intelligence in the first place.

The civilization-level pattern would be:

better tools → less cognitive friction → weaker native cognitive endurance → greater dependence on tools → even less friction

That is a reflexive loop.

And if it continues, you could get the strangest outcome imaginable:

the most intelligent civilization in history, surrounded by the most powerful cognitive machinery ever built, while the median human becomes less able to think without it.

That is what this chart makes me worry about.

[The Kobeissi Letter @KobeissiLetter]

BREAKING: The US government is now running a primary budget deficit of -3.59% of GDP, the largest among major advanced economies.

The primary budget deficit EXCLUDES the $1.1+ trillion in interest payments on existing government debt.

This is followed by the UK at -3.51% of the country’s GDP.

Belgium, France, Austria, and the Euro Area run primary budget deficits of -2.14%, -1.97%, -1.66%, and -1.40%, respectively.

In other words, even excluding the cost of servicing existing debt, which is the 2nd-largest US government expenditure, even larger than defense spending, the US deficit is the biggest relative to GDP among all major advanced economies.

US deficit spending is out of control.

[Kerry Propper @Greysmack]

https://t.co/bDI2WJNWRr

[Zach זק @ZachLewis3187]

The idea that Israel buys the government is farcical. Over the last 20 years, here is a side by side comparison between Qatar and Israel. No government has run a larger influence campaign in the US than Qatar.

[Kerry Propper @Greysmack]

Yuval Noah Harari: we “need to resist” giving AIs rights
https://t.co/f2cWHzM3D0
from The Economist

[Hedgie @HedgieMarkets]

🦔Delta's CEO said AI will boost profits by 50% by setting a different ticket price for every passenger in real time. The airline uses an AI system called Fetcherr that generates a unique price for each shopping request. Delta told Congress last year it was not using personal data for individualized pricing. Its investor presentation described building toward offers for "you, the individual." Airlines are exempt from FTC pricing oversight.

My Take
This is what AI does for a company like Delta. It doesn't make your flight better or your bag show up faster. It watches how you shop and figures out the most you'll pay before you close the tab. Consumer Reports found Uber and Lyft charging 42% different prices for the same ride at the same time, and the House Oversight Committee found one case where two people got quoted $76 and $24 for the same trip. Delta is building the airline version of that, and every carrier will follow because the economics are too good to pass up.

Walmart told us this week that families are choosing between gas and groceries at $4 a gallon. Delta's answer to those same families is an algorithm that squeezes them for every dollar they have left. Airlines are exempt from FTC pricing rules, state laws are preempted by federal deregulation, and the CEO told Congress one thing while telling investors another. When people ask me where the trillions going into AI actually end up, I think Delta just gave us one of the most honest answers we've gotten.

Hedgie🤗

[Fareed Zakaria @FareedZakaria]

For decades, Sweden was known for its inclusive welfare state and its strong voice on human rights.

But recently, the country has come to resemble something very different: an ultra-capitalist haven, with an increasingly tough approach on immigration.

I explained what changed:

[StopAntisemitism @StopAntisemites]

Outrageous - former Mamdani staffer Debbie Saslaw claims the attack on Central Synagogue was not a hate crime, despite the attacker screaming “Jewish swine” & “fake Jews”.

Saslaw took to X to falsely state Larry Montes was an Orthodox Jew upset with reform congregants.

Is ANYONE affiliated with Zohran not poisoned with hate?

[RedWave Press @RedWavePress]

Democrat Strategist James Carville: “I am not going to be in the same party with Hasan Piker. I can tell you that right now. If he becomes a force in the Democratic Party, I’m out of here. I have no intention of ever being in the political party with that guy.”

“I think that a majority, an overwhelming majority of Democrats agree with me. But this idea that we’re going to seize the means of production—just go look at the DSA platform. You don’t have to look any further than that.”

“I can’t sit here and tell you for certain how this is going to turn out. The one thing I can tell you is for certain: Hasan Piker and James Carville are not going to be in the same political party. One of us is going to leave. It might even be me.”

[The Vigilant Fox 🦊 @VigilantFox]

Bill Maher’s audience audibly gasps when he reads what the Democratic Socialists of America are actually saying out loud:

MAHER: “Trump has told 1 trillion lies, but when he says the DSA are actually COMMUNISTS, that’s not one of them.”

“And it’s not hard to prove it just by quoting the DSA and their candidates.”

“J.D. Vance was on the show, and I told him that if the Democratic Party keeps going in the direction of the DSA, my vote was in play. And all I heard all vacation was, ‘Oh, my God, you’re a Republican now.’ No, that's not what I said. I said in play, and here’s why.”

“Because not a week goes by where I don’t read about some newly chosen, exciting new face in the Democratic Party. And then when that face opens its mouth, the Communist Manifesto or some other crazy shit comes out! Again.”

“Let’s just read the quotes. The DSA platform says: ‘You work as much as you are able and no more than needed.’ If that was any closer to Karl Marx’s dictum, from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs, they’d be sued for plagiarism.”

“New York Mayor Mamdani once tweeted, Karl Marx’s words exactly. They’re not trying to hide it. Their most popular influencer, Hasan Piker, thinks communism is so groovy, he laments the fall of two of the most murderous regimes in history, the Soviet Union and Chairman Mao's China.”

“Mamdani's aide, his top aide, Cea Weaver, said, ‘If you don't believe in the government's sacred right to seize property, it's over.’ And ‘impoverish the white middle class.’ What? That's a goal? You know you're supposed to scare people into voting for you, right?”

“One of the new, soon-to-be Democratic congresspeople, Darlesia Chavalier, supports seizing all properties from landlords and said, ‘Seize the means of production.’ Mamdani has said ‘The end goal is seizing the means of production.’ I think they want to seize the means of production.”

“Now, maybe you missed that in school or missed school altogether, but THAT'S COMMUNISM.”

“Now the coalition within the DSA called the Marxist Unity Group is in ascendance. And I must take them at their word. When their words include, ‘Our commitment is to the long-term struggle for a fully liberated classless society. In a word, communism.’”

“What do they have to do, tweet out ‘Elect more communists’? Oh, yeah, Cea Weaver did that.”

[Shows tweet, audience audibly gasps]

“Yes, [she really did that]! ... People gotta realize this is going on.”

[Hedgie @HedgieMarkets]

🦔AI companies are bulk-buying rare books, scanning them through high-speed machines that cut the spines off, and shredding the originals. A service called ISBNdb facilitates orders of up to a million books and keeps buyers anonymous. Pre-2022 books are premium because they're free of AI-generated text. A federal judge ruled the practice is fair use because eliminating the original means only one copy exists at a time. Anthropic hired the former head of Google Books partnerships to obtain "all the books in the world."

My Take
This got to me. A bookseller told 404 Media that rare books with almost no surviving copies are being fed into this pipeline. Books that survived wars, fires, and centuries of handling are being shredded so an AI can learn to write a better marketing email.
ISBNdb's website literally says "'AI company destroys two million books' is not a headline that generates sympathy," and they still built an entire business around making it happen quietly. They offer NDAs as a feature. They coach clients to call it "digital preservation."

I've covered AI companies scraping the internet, torrenting libraries, and stealing music. This is worse because it's irreversible. You can re-upload a website. You can reprint a bestseller. You can't replace the last three copies of an 18th-century botanical text once someone shreds them for training data. And the judge said it's legal. So it's going to accelerate.
"We shred rare books and offer NDAs so nobody finds out" is a legitimate business model in 2026. What a timeline.

Hedgie🤗

[Masih Alinejad @AlinejadMasih]

These are prisoners inside Qezel Hesar, one of Iran's most notorious prisons, known for mass executions and brutal conditions.
One of them secretly got hold of a phone and risked everything to record this message for the outside world.
Executions are surging. They are asking for your help.
Listen to them. Be their voice.

[Julie Bindel @bindelj]

New laws in Afghanistan, introduced by the Taliban, mean that men can now marry girls at any age – there is no limit. Male relatives can arrange this with other men, and it’s only once the girls reach puberty that, in extremely limited circumstances, they can ask a court to dissolve the marriage. What’s happening in that country is horrific, and it begs the question why Amnesty are not putting all of their resources into tackling this latest child abuse atrocity.

[Van Jones @VanJones68]

I'm tired of being told that, to be a progressive, I now must swear allegiance to crazy ideas.

I'm a strong Democrat, with a winning bipartisan track record. I'm rooted in progressive ideals and policies: criminal justice reform, Green New Deal, Medicare for All, free education, clean air and water. These are ideas I have fought for my entire adult life.

But some people in groups like the DSA are pushing an agenda FAR outside those ideals. Supporting Hamas is not progressive. "No police, no prisons, no borders" is not progressive. Celebrating the murder of Israeli civilians is not progressive. These ideas are REGRESSIVE.

If there were no police or prisons, if anyone in your neighborhood could do whatever they wanted, while politicians cheered on terror groups — would that represent PROGRESS to you? No, that would be a step back. Those are REGRESSIVE ideas.

On the other hand, if everybody could see a doctor when they got sick, get a good, free education and breathe clean air — would that represent progress? Yes. Those are PROGRESSIVE ideas.

They are NOT the same thing. And the difference matters.

Some defend the far left by claiming they only want Nordic-style social democracy. If that were true, I might applaud them. I want those policies, too! But what does universal healthcare have to do with Hamas? With abolishing all law enforcement? With erasing all borders? With treating every wealthy person as a villain? Ideas matter. And these are terrible ideas.

Right now, extremists are trying to sneak backwards proposals into our party, hoping mainstream Democrats are too frustrated with MAGA and the Democratic Party establishment to notice.

But we see you.

Yes, we want our Democratic Party to be a big tent. But we don’t need "party poopers. So STOP pooping in the punch bowl — and telling us the turds are ice cubes.

They aren't. And we are smart enough to know the difference. 💩

[Niall Ferguson @nfergus]

I do not say this lightly: As a new and virulent strain of antisemitism spreads via algorithmic media and artificial intelligence, my life's work an an historian has been a failure. What now? A new essay with John-Clark Levin for @TheFP

[Nadeen Ebrahim @NadeenEbrahim9]

@AliVaez : “Tehran wants to project that it can lose its supreme leader without losing its continuity of governance.”

“Massive crowds and carefully choreographed ceremonies reinforce that message, but the conspicuous absence of key figures also reminds the world that the leadership still feels profoundly vulnerable and is not seeking to cast a broad umbrella.”

[Firas Maksad @FirasMaksad]

Small step between Israel & Lebanon is the @nytimes headline, but also bold & brave, with historic implications.

I explained that:

“Despite growing fears that Iran and Hezbollah are now emboldened by the outcome of the Iran war, by signing on to an understanding with #Israel, authorities in Beirut are signaling determination to maintain their role, not allowing Iran to dictate in #Lebanon.”

I am doubtful Lebanon will make significant progress on disarming Hezbollah anytime soon, or that Israel will complete its withdrawal. Iran & Hezbollah will also not miss an opportunity to sabotage.

What’s significant is that Israel & Lebanon now recognize their common interests in refusing the return of Iran’s domination over Lebanon. This is now manifested in a US-led coordination mechanism and a commitment to work towards peace.

https://t.co/hrggw0Zn1N

[Defiant L’s @DefiantLs]

CNN: Blue cities are out of control across the country

In La the"homelessness budget was $950M. Yet homelessness surged 80%"