Peter Kurrild-Klitgaard

Professor of political science (Copenhagen), newspaper columnist (@berlingske) & happy warrior.
Liberally blocks pseudonymous trolls.

[Peter Kurrild-Klitgaard @kurrild]

An American politician offering chocolate cookies to children in Greenland, if they come home to visit him ... Trump certainly knows how to pick his friends.

[Orla Joelsen @OJoelsen]

Governor Landry, to Greenlandic children:

“—If you come to the Governor’s Mansion in Louisiana, you can have all the chocolate chip cookies you can eat.”

—DR

[Henrik Qvortrup @QvortrupHenrik]

Så gik den - selvfølgelig - ikke længere. Thomas Nystrøm trækker sig med den forventelige begrundelse om ikke at ville "skygge".
Men for Pia Olsen Dyhr er skaden sket: Hun har demonstreret et påfaldende usikkert jugement, og hendes autoritet som leder er stærkt formindsket.

[FLPStruer @FLPSGV]

Når man læser Henning Fonsmarks bog om "Den danske Utopi" er der en ting, som er meget åbenbar, at ansvaret og at ansvarligheden i politikken er blevet væk. Det startede jf Fonsmark med opgøret efter krigen, hvor det politiske samarbejde med tyskerne, ikke blev bedømt.

[Erick Erickson @EWErickson]

So Iran opens the strait, gets a fee per ship passing through, gets $10 billion in cash minimum up front, and we punt on nuclear terms till later. This is an American surrender to a terrorist regime sold this morning to various conservative outlets to cheerlead.

[Andrew Neil @afneil]

JD Vance went to Ohio State then Yale. But clearly not to study history. WW2 did not end ‘with some kind of negotiation’.

[J.K. Rowling @jk_rowling]

Every single person who still cringes at the memory of trying to bullshit their way through an interview or exam question: today, the slate is wiped clean. Set down your burden of shame. Nothing - nothing, I say - could touch this.

[Erick Erickson @EWErickson]

At least 39 times in the last 65 days, the President of the United States has declared the United States and Iran were close to a deal only to have the Iranians openly mock him and deny it.
Yesterday, the President went on Fox & Friends in the morning to declare bombings would resume and be even more ferocious. By the afternoon, he declared bombings would cease because a deal was close. He claimed buy-in from the Egyptians, the Emirates, the Saudis, the Kuwaitis, the Israelis, the Iranians, and more.
Egypt said it had no knowledge of any deal. Israel said it had no knowledge of a deal. Then FARS, the semi-official Iranian news agency that represents the voice of the Revolutionary Guard in Iran said there was no deal. Overnight, word came the Ayatollah refused a deal. Then the Iranians started firing drones at commercial vessels in the Strait of Hormuz.

The President, the other days, said Iran was playing us. The only one being played is President Trump. A state of war exists between Iran and its neighbors. The ceasefire is a farce. The President has turned into a clown.
https://t.co/DszMvtbBVw

[Steve McGuire @sfmcguire79]

Berkeley math professor:

“Today, the more successful a public high school is at preparing its students, the lower its graduates' chances of getting into top UC campuses like Berkeley and San Diego.”

Berkeley admitted 45% of applicants from a high school where nearly 94% of “students failed to meet the state standards in mathematics.”

It admitted less than 14% of applicants from a school where “nearly 100 percent of its students in AP Calculus BC pass the national exam with a perfect score of 5.”

[Jonah Goldberg @JonahDispatch]

@domhnall_g I don’t really care about inequality very much. I care about poverty, I care about prosperity. Getting your panties in a bunch about inequality is an aesthetic gripe masquerading as a policy preference.

[Lars Christensen @MaMoMVPY]

THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION SHUTS DOWN THE MOST ADVANCED CLAUDE - AND REVEALS JUST HOW POLITICISED AMERICAN BUSINESS HAS BECOME

Out of the blue, the Trump administration has issued an export ban on the latest Claude models (from Anthropic).

Claude, alongside ChatGPT, is among the most popular language models in the world.

The directive hits both Fable 5 and Mythos 5. The official justification is a security concern - an official has said the Commerce Department acted after another company claimed it could "jailbreak" one of the models.

The consequence? Anthropic has chosen to remove access entirely, for everyone - Americans included.

You have to say it is rather impressive that investment growth in the US remains as high as it is, when the Trump administration is creating this level of regulatory uncertainty.

And it shows something else: that the administration is actively using intervention against the tech industry not only to hit hostile nations, but also Europe.

Frankly, I find it rather hard to see where all the optimism about America's long-term growth prospects is coming from, when you look at measures like this.
That said, Anthropic bears part of the blame itself.

Anthropic has, after all, spent the past months telling us again and again that its own models are so powerful they become dangerous. And if they really are that dangerous, then the obvious argument is for a ban. But then they ought to be banned in the US as well.

In my view, though, those statements are primarily aimed at investors. The company has just filed a confidential IPO prospectus, and the "danger" rhetoric conveniently talks up the valuation ahead of a coming flotation.

All in all: American business is becoming more and more politicised.

For the big companies, it means they either become part of the "regime" and succeed - or they die.

It bears a striking resemblance to the trajectory we have seen in countries like Turkey and Russia over the past 25 years.

Officially a capitalist system. But de facto a system where every single company lives at the mercy of the state.

[Peter Kurrild-Klitgaard @kurrild]

Valgets vigtigste lære er, at vi skal være skeptiske over for politikerne. SVM-regeringen, valgkampen og den nye regeringsdannelse blev nemlig endnu en illustration af, at vælgerne bør se mere på, hvad politikerne faktisk gør, end på hvad de lover. Men det sker nok ikke.
Min fredagsklumme i @berlingske om dét.
https://t.co/3FBBtxEX0e

[Steven Pinker @sapinker]

A moving sight: Notre Dame de Paris, restored 5 years after a devastating fire by 1,000 craftspeople, reviving medieval techniques, supported by >300,000 donations -- a testament to what humanity can accomplish when people work together toward a constructive goal.

[Greg Lukianoff @glukianoff]

“Free speech is outdated” usually means “I trust today’s censors more than yesterday’s.”

But the old problem remains: If you give someone the power to decide which ideas are too dangerous to hear, don’t be shocked when that power gets used against you.

[Peter Kurrild-Klitgaard @kurrild]

Valgets vigtigste lære er, at vi skal være skeptiske over for politikerne. SVM-regeringen, valgkampen og den nye regeringsdannelse blev nemlig endnu en illustration af, at vælgerne bør se mere på, hvad politikerne faktisk gør, end på hvad de lover. Men det sker nok ikke.
Min fredagsklumme i @berlingske om dét.
https://t.co/3FBBtxEX0e

[Sari Arho Havrén @SariArhoHavren]

Fiona Hill, the former aide to Trump during his first term, participated in the #Kultaranta Talks, organised by the President of Finland, and gave an interesting interview to the Helsingin Sanomat newspaper. Some excerpts:

▪️Greenland could suffer the same fate as Crimea.
▪️Hill says she sees the United States acting more like Russia, the White House more like the Kremlin, and Trump behaving more like Putin. ▪️Hill says that Trump's desire to take over Greenland is psychological. “He wants to own things. This is about him."
▪️”If we look at history, this is exactly how the Soviet Union acted towards its own Warsaw Pact allies: it occupied Hungary, it occupied Czechoslovakia, and it pressured Poland in a way that led to the declaration of martial law in Poland," Hill says.
▪️”Trump is now essentially treating his NATO allies the same way the Soviet leaders treated the Warsaw Pact members: as vassal states and states that have no decision-making power of their own."
▪️On the stage of the Kultaranta discussions, Hill was asked whether Europe can trust the United States.
Hill answered bluntly no. And she reminded that the next administration cannot necessarily be trusted either.

1/

[Anne Applebaum @anneapplebaum]

Amazing: KPMG wrote a report describing the successful use of AI by businesses. But the case studies turned out to be AI hallucinations.
https://t.co/s3LE8vedNi

[Rikke Sten @rikkestenpigen]

Hvis man ikke tror på advarslerne om hvor bøvlet og dyr fødevaremomsen bliver - så burde man læse denne historie.

Om en virksomhed, der får en regning fra staten på 90 millioner - fordi Skattestyrelsen pludselig nyfortolker 30 år gamle afgiftsregler.
Med tre års tilbagevirkende kraft. Plus renter!

Fordi myndighederne pludselig besluttede sig for, at en hidtil afgiftsfri pose nu var en afgiftsbelagt pose - fordi “den kan gennembrydes med en fingernegl”😒

BOM! Værsgo’ at betale med 3 års tilbagevirkende kraft - plus renter.
🤦🏼‍♀️🤦🏼‍♀️🤦🏼‍♀️

Det er et under, der stadig er folk der gider drive virksomhed i det her land.

[Steve McGuire @sfmcguire79]

A Berkeley history professor said he’s gone from assigning 100 pages of reading per week to 35.

Another “said the earliest version of the…course he taught required seven full books, while his most recent iteration exclusively consisted of excerpts.”

“We are now reaching a crisis point where if the number (of pages) goes down further, it’s unclear to me whether my discipline of history can really be taught,” the first one said.

[Ilya Somin @IlyaSomin]

The people on this site who accuse me of being a communist really ought to meet the people on Bluesky who say I'm a MAGA/Republican (and vice versa).

[Matthijs van de Burgwal @MvdBurgwal]

Prediction: future historians will look back on the degrowth movement as this century’s equivalent of the pacifist movements of the 20th century: driven by naïve moral signalling, fashionable in elite circles, and dangerously undermining freedom, democracy and human progress.