Andrew Badger

[Dave Smith @ComicDaveSmith]

If Trump had run in 24 on “we have been at war with Iran since 1979” (something he presumably could have known in 24) and we must launch a war that will get Americans killed, cost taxpayers billions and lead to higher prices, he would have lost in a landslide to Kamala Harris.

[The Hormuz Letter @HormuzLetter]

BREAKING: US intelligence assesses that Iran's new Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei is far more interested in a nuclear weapon than his father and is looking for ways to pursue an advanced thermonuclear warhead that could be miniaturized and placed on a long-range missile, per US officials to NYT.

US intelligence adds that Iranian officials who previously argued only a nuclear weapon could prevent an Israeli or American attack believe their position has been significantly strengthened.

[Max Klinger @MaxE2review]

The Economist had a short window to interview the guy who’s arguably advancing human capabilities more than any other single individual in many generations. So of course they spent it lecturing him for holding the ‘wrong’ political views, and telling him people ‘loathe’ him, because he refuses to accept their deeply ideological, midwit interpretation of reality and parrot groupthink as they do.

And they think this is all a big ‘win’ for them.

So embarrassing.

[Krzysztof Szczawinski 🇵🇱 @Kristof_Poland]

The Nuclear Family is a Technology of Western Civilization – So It Needs to Be Destroyed With All the Others.

The nuclear family is not a natural unit. It is a technology – the most successful child-rearing, wealth-transmitting, civilization-building technology ever developed. And like every other Western technology that works, it is currently being systematically dismantled.

1. Every society in history has organized reproduction and child-rearing somehow. The Eastern clan, the tribe, the loyalty network – these are the alternatives. They work, up to a point, for the societies that run on them. They produce strong internal solidarity and fierce external competition. They also produce nepotism over meritocracy, loyalty over competence, the network over the individual. Low-trust societies stay small and family-based – unable to build the large institutions, the corporations, the rule of law that require trust between strangers. The nuclear family is the Western solution: small enough to invest maximally in children, open enough to produce citizens who can cooperate beyond the clan.

2. It is a technology in the precise sense: a solution to a problem, developed through trial and error over millennia, encoding accumulated wisdom that is not immediately visible to those who inherit it. It aligned incentives with extraordinary precision – the man invested in children he was certain were his, the woman had a committed partner for the most vulnerable years, the children had two adults with maximum skin in the game. And crucially: it introduced a free market for mating rather than arranged marriage. Individuals chose their partners – which meant attraction, compatibility, and genuine commitment rather than clan negotiation. The most intimate human bond brought into the competitive, meritocratic framework that produces everything else the West does well.

3. The attack follows the standard pattern. Reframe the technology as oppression. Celebrate the alternatives as liberation. Restructure the incentives – welfare systems that replace the husband, legal systems that make marriage a liability for men, cultural systems that mock the committed father. Then watch the institution dissolve.

4. The data is not ambiguous. Children raised by married biological parents outperform children from every other arrangement on every measurable outcome. This is one of the largest and most replicated findings in social science. The nuclear family is not one lifestyle choice among many equivalent options. It is the arrangement that produces the best human beings at scale. Which is precisely why it had to go.

5. The deepest damage is not measurable. The nuclear family was the primary transmission mechanism of civilization – values, habits, language, culture, and identity passed from one generation to the next in the most intensive possible environment. Destroy this transmission mechanism and you don’t just produce worse outcomes for individuals. You break the chain. The torch cannot change hands if the hands are gone.

6. The replacement is the state. When the family dissolves, the state expands to fill the functions the family performed. This is not a coincidence. It is the design. Tocqueville described it: the soft despotism that replaces every horizontal bond with a vertical dependency on the government shepherd. The nuclear family was the primary horizontal bond. Its dissolution is the prerequisite for the complete vertical dependency the administrative state requires.

7. The nuclear family is not a conservative preference or a religious requirement. Defend it not because it is traditional. Defend it because it works – and because what is offered in its place doesn’t. The clan and the tribe produce loyalty. The administrative state produces dependency. The nuclear family, with its free market for mating and its maximum investment in the next generation, produces citizens. That is the one thing the system replacing it cannot afford to produce.

[India Infographics Guy @Deshpacito661]

A hairdresser with zero archaeological completely changed our understanding of Roman hairstyling tools because she tried reproducing hairstyles on Roman statues.

She couldn’t replicate the styles so she started going through Roman manuscripts using Google Translate to find references to tools. She discovered that Roman’s used bone needles to weave hairstyles like fabric…. Something Latin scholars with zero knowledge of hair styling missed

[Michael Lucci @Michael7ucci]

Elbridge Colby spelled out his critique of Mark Carney's "middle powers" fantasy in an interview with @DouthatNYT.

The problem is not primarily about harm to America. Mark Carney's geopolitical fantasy will harm *the countries that follow Carney's lead.*

[Kyle Chan @kyleichan]

After US export controls, China launched a Manhattan Project for semiconductors, led by Ding Xuexiang. This year marks a turning point for Chinese AI chips.

Glad I could contribute thoughts to this excellent piece by @joshchin @raffaelehuang https://t.co/9mZ1v39zr4

[Fugitive Caesar @ThomBrady5]

The biggest reason for optimism is that you see right-wing figures have developed a sense of moral superiority and ethical confidence when confronted by Leftist demands. We're no longer represented by Boomer conservatives trapped in the moral framework of Leftist egalitarianism.

[Isaac Stone Fish @isaacstonefish]

For those gorging on free or cheaper Chinese AI models, be careful. Don’t you understand that Chinese companies will raise their prices or restrict their models? Don’t you understand that it will be very complicated and expensive to replace your Chinese AI model when this happens? Don’t you think this is by design? Don’t you understand Beijing did took similar steps with solar panels, telecom and equipment, and critical minerals?
Great op-ed by @augama

[Ryan Fedasiuk @RyanFedasiuk]

I have real concerns with the growing popularity of Chinese open-source AI and think anyone who cares about U.S. national security should feel the same.

That does not mean I want the models banned—I don't. That would be a fool's errand and ultimately spell disaster for our own cybersecurity.

I want China's AI models labeled, and I want to hold accountable those Chinese labs that conduct large-scale extraction campaigns that infringe American companies' ToS and trade secrets. Simply allowing China to freeride on Americans' generational investment in computing infrastructure is not a tenable position.

American frontier labs do bear ultimate responsibility for protecting their IP—but it is also in the legitimate national security interest of the United States to help them protect it from Chinese competitors.

That mandate does not extend to protecting a handful of U.S. frontier labs from domestic economic competition. Ultimately the best defense against China's rapid expansion in the AI services market is a good offense: We should promote an open-source AI industry in the United States.

[Henry Shevlin @dioscuri]

My students sometimes ask why they should memorise things in the age of Google and LLMs. But internalised facts are your bullshit filters and your raw material for creative association. Facts outside your head are inert.

[Lexa _ Reloaded @webaxvita]

Während man in Deutschland darüber debattiert, wie man noch mehr Geld in die Ukraine transferieren kann, entwickelte China die nächste Generation von Schultafeln.

[@levelsio @levelsio]

🇪🇺 This year the European Union will again make more money from fining US tech companies

Than from the total tax income from Europe's own public tech companies!

[Luke de Pulford @lukedepulford]

By “discuss Ukraine”, I hope you mean that you asked China to stop facilitating a war in Europe? And clarified that the UK wouldn’t stand idly by as China circumvents sanctions to enable Putin’s illegal war effort?

[Saagar Enjeti @esaagar]

In March 2025 Trump said we would destroy the Houthis

51 days later he did a ceasefire after 1000 airstrikes, a US fighter jet fell off a carrier, an F35 was clipped and the Houthis ability to disrupt Red Sea traffic was completely unchanged

[medoyid_ua @LetsArmUKR]

The Foreign Affairs piece on China's economic model is one of those rare analyses that actually cuts through the usual Western cope. Beijing didn't rise by magic or superior central planning. It rose because it got plugged straight into Western markets, technology transfers, and capital flows that the liberal order kept wide open. Now the same system is being weaponized against its creators, and the bill is coming due faster than Brussels wants to admit.

The core trap is exactly as laid out: China's growth model runs on suppressed domestic consumption and massive overinvestment in production capacity. Ordinary Chinese households capture too small a share of the pie, so factories churn out far more than the internal market can absorb. The surplus gets dumped abroad, subsidized by the state, whether we're talking EVs, solar panels, machinery, or steel. This isn't free trade. It's mercantilism with Chinese characteristics, and it is already triggering the predictable backlash: tariffs, anti-dumping probes, friend-shoring, and quiet efforts to rebuild supply chains that don't run through Guangzhou.

Europe is sleepwalking into the worst version of this trap. Cheap Chinese imports feel like a win for consumers in the short term, but they are hollowing out industrial competence, skilled jobs, and the ability to produce critical goods at home. Lose your own manufacturing base and you don't just become dependent on Beijing for widgets. You become dependent for the strategic means to defend yourself. That is not an economic problem anymore. It is a security problem with Chinese characteristics, especially when you remember that Beijing, Moscow, Tehran, and Pyongyang have been tightening their axis while we pretend separate bilateral deals will contain it.

The irony is brutal. The very openness that let China industrialize at warp speed is now being eroded by China's own behavior. The more aggressively Beijing floods markets and displaces competitors, the faster those competitors raise barriers and duplicate production elsewhere. Beijing is burning the bridge it used to cross the river, all while still needing Western consumers to keep its factories running. That is not master strategy. That is a structural contradiction dressed up in nationalist slogans and Xi Jinping photo-ops surrounded by red flags and ceremonial guards.

For Ukraine this matters directly. We are building our own defense industry at wartime speed precisely because we cannot afford strategic dependence on any single supplier, least of all actors aligned with the Moscow-Tehran-Pyongyang supply chain that keeps feeding our enemy. Europe should be doing the same instead of debating how many more subsidized Chinese EVs it can absorb before its own industrial base collapses. The choice is no longer abstract: subsidize your own productive capacity and protect critical sectors, or become the world's largest captive market for a rival civilization that views your openness as a weakness to exploit.

The post-appeasement era is here. Moscow taught us the hard way what happens when you let imperial revisionists rewrite the rules while you chase short-term margins. China is simply playing the same game at global scale. Time to stop pretending the rules still favor the open society that created the pie everyone wants to carve up. Either the West rebuilds its industrial sinews and strategic autonomy, or it learns the expensive way that gratitude for past growth does not buy immunity from future predation.

[Spandrell @spandrell4]

China is an odd place because the intellectual elite is, in a way, more religious than the plebs.

They will talk of fate and history in that metaphysical way, perhaps the only part of Marxism that really caught on.

[Eduard Habsburg @EduardHabsburg]

Is there a law in modern cinema that all heroes now have to be old, bitter, self-doubting and broken?
(Or is that just because many boomer are old, bitter, self-doubting and broken?)
(Or because we can't have male heroes any more?)

[Michael Sobolik @michaelsobolik]

Mercedes is answering a question Congress isn’t asking. “No board control” is not the same as “no CCP leverage.”

BAIC is also Mercedes’ China JV partner. That relationship doesn’t show up on a shareholder register, but it’s where the company’s China dependency lies.

Beijing doesn’t need board votes to make life difficult for Mercedes globally. It can squeeze the Chinese JV (production quotas, slow-walking approvals, informal pressure) as leverage over Mercedes’ global corporate decisions (discouraging Mercedes from fully complying with US restrictions, or pressuring supplier choices) in ways that favor Chinese suppliers.

[Director Michael Kratsios @mkratsios47]

We have information that Moonshot AI distilled Anthropic’s Fable for the development of its K3 model.

To do this they developed a sophisticated internal platform to conduct large scale distillation against U.S. models, allowing them to quickly switch between multiple methods of access to avoid detection. Moonshot AI has also acquired GB300-equipped servers and has accessed GB300s in Thailand, likely to train its AI models.

The United States strongly supports the free and fair development of AI, including a thriving competitive ecosystem that spans frontier models, specialized systems, open-source frameworks, and open-weight models. Legitimate AI distillation used to create smaller, more efficient models plays a vital role in this open innovation ecosystem. However, large-scale, covert industrial distillation aimed at stealing proprietary U.S. technology and undermining American research is unacceptable.