Boeing
USAF NGAD: Boeing P‑47 concept image
 

2025 March 21

Boeing Wins NGAD Contract

The Aviationist

Boeing has been awarded a $20 billion contract to develop the USAF Next Generation Air Dominance manned fighter. Each NGAD fighter may cost $300 million.
POTUS 47: "The F‑47 will be the most advanced, most capable, most lethal aircraft ever built. An experimental version of the plane has secretly been flying for almost five years, and we're confident that it massively overpowers the capabilities of any other nation."

AR This will be the new top predator on planet Earth.
 

European Leadership: Germany

John Kampfner

Germany has woken up. A €500 billion infrastructure injection and a similar increase in defense spending ensure that Germany can modernize its economy and play its part in reinforcing Europe. Germany has a serious political culture, a durable constitution, and a mature process of building and testing coalitions. This is what Germany, Europe, and the West need.

AR I'll second that.

 

⦿ KPNO/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA/T Slovinský
Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) at the Kitt Peak National Observatory, Arizona
 

2025 Spring Equinox

Our Doom: Big Rip or Big Crunch?

Katrina Miller, Dennis Overbye

Astronomers have unveiled evidence that dark energy is not constant. It may not doom our universe to a future Big Rip. Instead, cosmic expansion could wane, leaving the universe stable, or reverse, leading to a Big Crunch.
The evidence comes from the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) running on a telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory in Arizona. The DESI team announced it at an APS meeting in California on Wednesday.
The expansion of the universe is accelerating, as predicted by the cosmological constant − a fudge factor that Einstein put in his theory of gravity. Quantum theory says empty space is full of energy, producing a repulsive force just like the fudge factor − now in the standard model of cosmology.
The standard model describes a universe born 13.8 billion years ago in the Big Bang and composed of 5% atomic matter, 25% dark matter, and 70% dark energy. If dark energy is constant, the model predicts that the universe will keep speeding up forever, pulling everything apart in a Rig Rip.
DESI astronomers survey the distances between galaxies over cosmic time to compile a catalog of millions of galaxies and other celestial objects. They say the cosmic acceleration driven by dark energy began earlier in time, and is currently weaker, than what the standard model predicts.
The discrepancy between data and theory is at most 4.2 σ, not yet at the 5 σ standard for a discovery. DESI will continue collecting data.

Is dark energy getting weaker?
Charlie Wood

Dark energy is losing steam. The DESI finding aligns with that of the Dark Energy Survey (DES). DES reported evidence of varying dark energy earlier this month.
In his theory of gravity, Einstein added a cosmological constant, causing repulsion. Dark energy may be the vacuum energy predicted in quantum physics. Evolving dark energy could lead to new physics.
DESI and DES are both mapping millions of celestial objects to illuminate the last 11 billion years or so of cosmic history. The DESI team focused on how galaxies cluster into shells left by ripples in the young universe. They used the shells to reconstruct cosmic expansion in detail.
The first year of DESI data yielded signs that dark energy may have been weakening over the last few billion years. Their data set covered 6 million galaxies. The new data set spans nearly 15 million.
The data could match either an evolving dark energy model or the standard theory of cosmology, the ΛCDM model, which assumes a cosmological constant. But when DESI researchers also factored in data on thousands of supernovas and data on the cosmic microwave background (CMB), the combined data sets departed starkly from ΛCDM and pointed to an evolution in dark energy.
DESI reported last spring that the combined data sets diverged from what the ΛCDM model would predict by as much as 3.9 σ. Now that figure has ticked up to 4.2 σ. The tension with ΛCDM persists even if one deletes the CMB data or the supernova data.
The DES team created a catalog of supernovas. Combining that data with CMB observations, they found a tension with ΛCDM of 3.2 σ that disappears when dark energy is presumed to change.
Dark energy seems to have gradually intensified for billions of years before starting to slack off about 6 billion years ago. Perhaps the data from that earlier period is inaccurate.
Cumrun Vafa says universes built of strings can't maintain a positive energy forever, and the DESI data aligns with a slow decline that appears in many models of stringy universes.
DESI plans to make a third cosmic map of 50 million galaxies by late 2026 or early 2027.

AR Well, this is reassuring. We still need a theory to tell us what dark energy is.

 

⦿ Maxim Shemetov
Vladimir Putin with Belarus president Alexander Lukashenko, Moscow, 2025-03-13

AR Putin is a small man in a big world. His authoritarian dreams of imperial glory
are completely inadequate to the new realities of life on Earth.
 

2025 March 19

The Bromance of Vlad and Don

Thomas L Friedman

In his phone call with Donald Trump on Tuesday, Vladimir Putin did not agree to a general 30‑day ceasefire. His conditions show he is looking to own Ukraine.
If Trump sells out Ukraine to Putin, he will forever be marked as a traitor to a core US value: the defense of liberty against tyranny.
Trump says he wants to end "the killing" in Ukraine. The easiest and quickest way to end the killing is for the side that started the killing to get out of Ukraine.
Putin wants Trump to help him get a big slice of Ukraine and neutralize the remainder. He wants Ukraine to be like Belarus, not like Poland.
Trump has left all our European allies on the sidelines. The Europeans are determined to stop Putin.

Telefonat 'Nullnummer'
Spiegel Politik

US-Präsident Donald Trump will Russlands Staatschef Wladimir Putin zu einem zunächst für 30 Tage geltenden Waffenstillstand in der Ukraine bewegen. Doch weitreichende Konsequenzen hatte sein Telefongespräch nicht. Russland setzte seine Angriffe am Mittwoch fort.
Bundesverteidigungsminister Boris Pistorius bewertet die Ergebnisse des Trump-Putin-Telefonats als "Nullnummer": Mit dem von vereinbarten Ende der russischen Angriffe werde "ausgerechnet die Infrastruktur weniger angegriffen, die in der Ukraine am besten geschützt ist".

AR Transatlantic solidarity has collapsed. Russia and China are winning.
 

2025 March 15

Coalition of the Willing

PA, 1244 UTC

UK PM Keir Starmer: "Today, I hosted a call with counterparts from across Europe, as well as the NATO secretary-general and the leaders of the EU Commission, EU Council, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand to discuss our support for Ukraine. We welcomed the .. US proposal for an immediate and unconditional 30‑day ceasefire .. agreed that now the ball was in Russia's court .. reaffirmed our commitment to Ukraine's long-term security .. agreed that in the case that president Putin refused to agree to an immediate and unconditional ceasefire, we would need to increase our efforts to strengthen Ukraine, weaken Russia's war machine, and ratchet up pressure on president Putin .. to ensure a just and lasting peace in Ukraine."

AR Je suis d'accord. Keep up the good work.
 

2025 March 14

America's Reputation Is Shot

David Brooks

President Trump does not seem to notice or care that if you betray people, or jerk them around, they will revile you. Over the last few weeks, the Europeans have gone from shock to bewilderment to revulsion. They have realized that America, the nation they thought was their friend, is actually a rogue superpower.
China's special representative for European affairs to the EU: "I believe European friends should .. compare the Trump administration's policies with those of the Chinese government. In doing so, they will see that China's diplomatic approach emphasizes peace, friendship, good will, and win‑win cooperation."

AR I trust I have no illusions about China, but I find its version of neighborly cooperation better than others on offer as big powers vie for dominance on planet Earth.
 

2025 March 13

Maganomics

Jonathan Portes

US president Donald Trump's approach to trade, tax, and government is Maganomics, a combination of economic nationalism and tech-bro rightism.
Elon Musk sees things the same way as Ayn Rand: Human progress and prosperity depends on the selfish actions of heroic individuals, and the sole role of government is to protect the freedoms of such individuals. Musk's DOGE approach to re-engineering government is pure Rand.
The contradictions between populist nativism and tech-bro libertarianism resemble the UK tensions that broke up the Brexit coalition.

AR The US fiscal trajectory is unsustainable. Hedge against financial Götterdämmerung.

 

NASA
NASA astronaut Suni Williams outside the International Space Station, 2025-01-16
NASA has abruptly closed its chief-scientist office, along with 2 other offices, firing 23 employees.
This comes when NASA aims to send astronauts to the Moon and develop plans to go to Mars.
DOGE czar Elon Musk aims to downsize US federal government by getting federal agencies to fire employees.
Acting NASA administrator Janet Petro: "We're viewing this as an opportunity to reshape our workforce."

AR Downsizing NASA leaves an opening for SpaceX − massive conflict of interest.
 

2025 March 12

Trump America Won't End Well

Bret Stephens

Tariffs are a terrible idea. US tariffs turned a global economic crisis into WW2.
Donald Trump is ignorant of the lessons of history. Stock markets plunged following his tariff threats against trading partners, unpredictable reprieves, and risking recession in the United States. This won't end well:
•  The DOGE will gut the IRS work force but won't lower your taxes. Mass firings of thousands of federal employees won't raise productivity but lead to a decade of litigation. Cutting wasteful spending will leave Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, and defense untouched.
•  Threats against formerly friendly Canada have boosted the political fortunes of Canadian Liberals. Threatening to take Greenland from NATO ally Denmark has shaken the alliance.
•  The outreach to the European far right benefit Germany's AfD and France's RN. They hate America's vulgar culture, revolting fast food, rapacious capitalism, and imperial pretensions. Walking away from NATO will lead to a Germany ruled by fascists armed with nuclear weapons.
•  The Ukraine negotiations won't end the war unless America supports Kyiv with more arms, a security guarantee, a nod to EU membership, and opposition to Moscow.
Trump now faces a Russia that sees no reason to settle, a Europe that will go its own way, a China that believes America will fold, and a Ukraine that cannot trust him.
Trump's policymaking is shambolic.

AR MAGA America looks doomed to repeat some of the worst follies of the twentieth century.

 

CNSA
China National Space Administration's Mars rover Zhurong next to its landing platform imaged by a camera dropped by the rover.
A new study based on its 2021−2022 data finds evidence of sandy beaches beside an ocean on Mars 3.6 billion years ago.
 

2025 March 7

China on MAGA

CNN

China's foreign minister Wang Yi: "There are more than 190 countries in the world. Should everyone stress 'my country first' and obsess over a position of strength, the law of the jungle would reign again, smaller and weaker countries would bear the brunt first, and international norms and order would take a body blow."

Russian view
CNN

Russian state media reporter Igor Naymushin: "Trump [is] giving Russia all the cards and tools to successfully continue the special military operation .. all the tragedies of the world originated in Europe or happened thanks to European policy."

European view
The Guardian

Denmark's prime minister Mette Frederiksen: "Spend, spend, spend on defence and deterrence .. continue to support Ukraine, because we want peace in Europe."

AR Here in the MAGA jungle world, we have three dominant powers vying for supremacy: America, Russia, and China, with Europe struggling to dethrone Russia. China is taking the longer view.
 

2025 March 6

Europe Can Prevail

Bruno Maçães

Keir Starmer and Emmanuel Macron are chasing US security guarantees that may be worthless. Friedrich Merz says Europe must achieve strategic independence.
US VP JD Vance says the only security guarantee the Trump administration is willing to offer Ukraine is their minerals deal. Russia would be happy to take over Ukraine and do a deal with Americans.
Nothing Trump or Vance have said would prevent Russia from threatening Ukrainian sovereignty again after a peace deal. Does anyone believe Trump will support Ukraine militarily after the ceasefire?
A minerals deal may well be signed in the coming days. Trump: "If somebody doesn't want to make a deal, I think that person won't be around very long."
The process initiated by Trump will culminate in Ukraine's disappearance as a sovereign country. The alternative must be presented as a different plan in opposition to Trump's ideas.
Europeans can seize frozen Russian reserves and transfer them to Ukraine. It can make drones for the conflict. Eutelsat can support new users in Ukraine.
Merz says Germany will do whatever it takes to defend freedom and peace in Europe.

AR There's hope if Germany can move fast enough.
 

2025 March 5

UK−US Relations

Patrick Wintour

UK ambassador to the United States from 2007 to 2012 Nigel Sheinwald: "America is genuinely changing and the American leadership has changed .. It's difficult to find either a conceptual area in international relations or a particular geographical area where our interests are really converging at the moment .. On more or less any big foreign policy issue that we're dealing with today, we don't agree with the United States and have more alignment with our European partners."
UK ambassador to the United States from 2012 to 2016 Sir Peter Westmacott: "Even if we are now back in the business of trying to find a way forward with a combination of a ceasefire plan and security guarantees that Ukraine needs, we still have got that fundamental problem of a very different approach to Russia."

AR Clear verdict: Keir Starmer take note.
 

2025 March 4

The Imperialist Philosopher

James Verini

Aleksandr Dugin has been called the prophet of the new Russian Empire. His voluminous writings have indelibly shaped Russian politics and policy. Putin has adopted his views.
Dugin inveighs against democracy, secularism, individualism, civil society, multiculturalism, human rights, sexual openness, technology, and scientific rationalism.
He says the destruction of Ukraine is essential for Russia: "The existence of Ukraine .. is tantamount to delivering a monstrous blow to Russia's geopolitical security."
When Putin announced the start of his "special military operation" in Ukraine, he accused the West of seeking to "destroy our traditional values and force on us their false values."
Dugin was born in Moscow in 1962. He dropped out and took up with a group of underground writers in Moscow. In 1983, after the KGB detained him for questioning, he worked odd jobs while reading deeply in the Russian canon, the European canon, Eastern philosophy, and Heidegger's Sein und Zeit.
Dugin wrote that the Russian Empire was alive and sacred, chosen by God to "speak for all of those who have been humiliated and insulted."
After the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, the Soviets stamped out a brief Ukrainian People's Republic. Stalin banned the Ukrainian language, liquidated Kyiv's political class and intelligentsia, and starved millions of Ukrainians to death.
The end of the Soviet Union was a period of social collapse and economic ruin. Putin: "We remember [that the West] called us friends and partners, but they treated us like a colony, using various schemes to pump trillions of dollars out of the country."
Dugin, 1997: "The battle for Russian world domination is not over .. The continued existence of a unitary Ukraine is unacceptable."
He confessed: "I myself am Ukrainian. I'm ashamed of that small but still significant part of my blood. And I want this blood to be cleansed with the blood of the scum, the Kyiv junta. And I think, Kill, kill, and kill!"
Dugin: "A Russian hero is first and foremost a victim. He knows that his fate is tragic, and his path is suffering."

AR This sounds less like philosophy, more like drivel.

 

⦿ Justin Tallis/AP
European leaders summit, Lancaster House, London, 2025-03-02
 

2025 March 2

European Leaders Summit

BBC News

UK PM Keir Starmer unveils a four-step plan to guarantee peace in Ukraine, following a summit with European leaders in London:
•  Military aid must keep flowing into Ukraine while the war is ongoing, with increased economic pressure on Russia
•  Any lasting peace must ensure Ukraine's sovereignty and security, and Ukraine must be at the table for any peace talks
•  In the event of a peace deal, European leaders will aim to deter any future invasion by Russia into Ukraine
•  A "coalition of the willing" would defend Ukraine and guarantee peace in the country
He adds Europe must do the heavy lifting but needs US backing. The UK, France, and others have agreed to work with Ukraine to end the fighting.
The UK government will allow Ukraine to use £1.6 billion of UK export finance to buy more than 5,000 air defence missiles.
European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen: "It's important we prepare for the worst."

AR European leaders have drawn the necessary conclusions from last week's events and agreed to do the right thing. I find this reassuring.

 

AR
First day of spring on Poole Bay
 

2025 March 1

A Day of American Infamy

Bret Stephens

Friday, Oval Office, Washington — Volodymyr Zelensky was prepared to sign away anything he could offer President Trump except Ukraine's freedom, security, and common sense. For that, he was rewarded with a lecture on manners from the most mendacious vulgarian and ungracious host ever to inhabit the White House.

Relationship damaged beyond repair
Ben Hall

Volodymyr Zelensky's visit to the White House on Friday was supposed to salvage his relationship with Donald Trump. Instead, it descended into an angry argument, a breathtaking spectacle, broadcast to the world from the Oval Office.

Talks degenerate into shouting match
Andrew Roth, Lauren Gambino

US military support for Ukraine hangs in the balance and talks over a minerals deal have collapsed following a disastrous White House summit. Trump: "This is going to be great television."

A great moment?
Edward Helmore

White House deputy chief of staff for policy Stephen Miller said Zelensky was impertinent and called the showdown a great moment in American diplomacy: "Millions of American hearts swelled with overflowing pride today to watch President Trump put Zelensky in his place."

Why aren't we in the streets?
Susan B Glasser

Trump has appointed the most extreme Cabinet in American history. Wednesday's Cabinet meeting opened with a prayer from the new secretary of housing and urban development Scott Turner: "Thank you, God, for President Trump."

AR Trump was showing the world how tough he could be, in case Putin thought Trump's friendliness meant he'd be a pushover in negotiations over Ukraine.

 

⦿ Haiyun Jiang for The New York Times
Third-term Democrat senator for Connecticut Chris Murphy:
"Donald Trump is standing up on that podium and lying to you, deliberately lying to you."
"Our political brand is fundamentally broken, the rule of law is disintegrating, and a lot of people
still don't know what Trump's actual agenda is."
"Dictators and despots, they use law enforcement to try and compel loyalty. They threaten you
with arrest if you're not loyal; they will let you get away with crimes if you are loyal.
That's what's happening in America today."
 

2025 February 28

Spacetime Inside Black Holes

Lyndie Chiou

In 1969, Vladimir Belinski, Isaak Khalatnikov, and Evgeny Lifshitz (BKL) presented a new solution to Einstein's equations of gravity near a singularity.
BKL found that in a black hole formed from irregularly shaped objects is a roiling sea of spacetime stretching and compressing in multiple directions.
Strong gravitational fields can disconnect regions of spacetime by dilating time to make interaction impossible. Approaching a singularity decouples all points to leave a mishmash.
Around each decoupled point, space stretches in a random direction and compresses in the other two directions. A random moment later, it flips.
The AdS/CFT correspondence relates a higher-dimensional bulk and a lower-dimensional boundary, with gravity on the AdS side and CFT on the boundary side.
Sean Hartnoll et al use the correspondence to find patterns in the chaos inside an AdS black hole. This may help us in quantum gravity.

AR No big surprise there, but chaos suggests turbulence and resistance to flow. Anyway, what about strings, branes, and puffed-up fuzzballs (see below)?
 

2025 February 24

Black Hole Fuzzballs

Samir Mathur

Black holes form when spacetime forms a deep pit. As gas falls into a black hole, its entropy increases with the area of its event horizon. Stretched spacetime around the event horizon lets virtual particles escape as radiation.
String theory says particles are made of strings and branes. A stringy black hole has the right entropy to emit radiation at the right rate. When many strings and branes make a black hole, their numbers increase its size. They fluff up into fuzzballs that extend up to the event horizon.
A stringy black hole can take any of many possible fuzzball shapes. Its entropy is in its many fuzzball shapes. Fuzzballs let information leak out from the stringy surface.
Matter and energy are fluctuations in quantum fields. Virtual particles are disturbances in the fields. Bound states of real particles imprint spacetime with a web of virtual correlations. A vast number of virtual fuzzballs of all sizes imprint a web of correlations throughout the cosmic vacuum.
When a black hole forms, the cosmic correlations of virtual fuzzballs change in strength to reflect their new separations by exchanging signals. Quantum fluctuations in the pit cannot develop the correlations to form a stable vacuum but tie spacetime in knots, resulting in a stringy fuzzball.
General relativity fails when spacetime stretches too fast or too far for light speed signaling. Virtual fuzzballs cannot imprint spacetime with correlations across cosmic distances, so the vacuum energy acts like dark energy.

AR Excellent work! A natural development of recent theory, a vivid and novel outcome, and two big problems apparently solved. Well done, that team!
 

2025 February 21

President for Life?

Thomas L Friedman

Donald Trump looks at the world like it's the retail section in a Trump Tower. Everything is purely transactional.
The EU may be mankind's greatest creation. Trump sees it as a trading bloc that can exercise more leverage on the United States than he'd like. So he'd like to break it up.
Vladimir Putin wants Trump to come in and save him from his colossal failure. If Putin were American, he'd be a Proud Boy, a white Christian nationalist, a Trump voter.
Trump's Ukraine strategy is all about his midterm election. He thinks if he can end this war and lift sanctions on Russia, Russian oil will swamp the global market, it'll drive down the price of gas at the pump, and he'll win.
Three major leaders on the world stage want to be president for life: Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin, and Donald Trump. Xi made himself president for life. Putin made himself president for life. We stopped Trump from doing it.
If this were't my country, I'd put my feet up, grab some popcorn. and watch the show.

A more dangerous world
Nicholas Kristof

President Trump is siding with Putin and poisoning relations with longtime US allies. The transatlantic alliance is unraveling.
Former EU foreign affairs chief Chris Patten: "We have Trump and his oligarchy of ignorant shoe shiners vandalizing the network of organizations, agreements and values .. which have given most of us, including America, on the whole an extraordinary degree of peace and prosperity .. Where are the American values that I used to admire?"
Trump seems determined to put the United States in the Russian orbit. Europe must manage Russia on its own.

AR For life? He's an old man, showing signs of dementia, maybe not long to go. More troubling is the global damage he can do already, as he has this week.

 

US State Department
L to R: US special envoy Steve Witkoff, US secretary of state Marco Rubio, US national security adviser Mike Waltz,
Saudi chairs, Russian foreign policy adviser Yuri Ushakov, Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov, 2025-02-18
 

2025 February 18

US−Russia Relations

Pjotr Sauer, Luke Harding

Top US and Russian officials met in Saudi Arabia for the most extensive negotiations between the two countries in three years. They agreed to continue planning an end to the Ukraine war and to pursue closer cooperation.
After five hours of talks, US secretary of state Marco Rubio said they had agreed to create a team to support Ukraine peace talks and to explore "economic and investment opportunities" following an end to the war.

AR Who said "stitch-up"?
 

2025 February 16

Europe: An American Colony

Bruno Maçães

At the Munich Security Conference, US defense secretary Pete Hegseth laid out US terms:
•  No Ukrainian membership of NATO
•  No American boots on the ground
•  Russia keeps stolen Ukrainian land
Trump wants a deal between Russians and Americans. He may leave Ukrainians out of negotiations. If he reaches a deal with Putin, it will let European troops secure Ukraine. Americans will sell US arms and take Ukrainian natural resources; Europe will pay to reconstruct Ukraine.
Trump wants his American empire to exploit Europe rather than to confront Russia. He wants Europe to pay for the border wars. His officials want closer interoperability with European militaries on missile systems, ammunition, AI, and cyber warfare so that European nations buy more US arms.
Europe needs independence just when it needs American power.

AR This may be the shock that Europe (including the UK) needs to get its defensive act together. Europe has numerous small forces that don't work together smoothly enough and buy nationally sourced arms and ammo. This is absurd, a recipe for defeat on the battlefield.
 

2025 February 15

Collapse of the Transatlantic Alliance

Patrick Wintour

At the Munich Security Conference on Friday, US VP JD Vance said the greatest danger to Europe was not Russia or China but the "danger from within" as an entrenched elite continued to allow mass migration and locked voters out of political debate.
For the MAGA movement, US withdrawal from Europe is an ideological break: NATO was founded to defend shared values, but if those values are no longer shared, the purpose of NATO is gone.
Vance said Germany should accept AfD populists: "If you're running in fear of your own voters, there is nothing America can do for you, nor, for that matter, is there anything that you can do for the American people."
German chancellor Olaf Scholz: "The AfD is a party from the ranks of which National Socialism and its monstrous crimes .. were trivialized."
Volodymir Zelensky: "The US vice-president made it clear .. The old days are over .. Europe needs its own armed forces."

AR Continuing mass immigration of Muslims into Europe certainly poses an existential danger to European traditions and values. But a more civilized and constructive solution is possible than encouraging the populist uprising that Vance seems to be recommending.
Europeans should recall their long heritage and end mass immigration now. They can do better than seeking to boost GDP growth by importing unskilled workers.
Is the UK's "special relationship" over? Yes.

 

The Guardian
DOGE supremo Elon Musk holds court in the Oval Office
 

2025 February 12

Musk Claims Federal Fraud

The New York Times

Elon Musk said in the Oval Office on Tuesday that he was providing maximum transparency in his sweeping claims that the federal bureaucracy had been corrupted by cheats and officials duped by fraudsters.
Answering questions as head of the Department of Government Efficiency, Musk stood next to the Resolute Desk and asserted that his work was in the interest of the public and democracy.
Musk: "If the bureaucracy's in charge, then what meaning does democracy actually have? We are actually trying to be maximally transparent .. I don't know of a case where an organization has been more transparent than the DOGE organization."
Musk appeared at a presidential signing of new executive orders related to his cost-cutting initiative. His remarks came amid criticism that he was operating with unchecked power and no accountability.
Wearing a black MAGA hat, Musk defended his team's work. As he answered questions, his 4-year-old son, X, sat on the floor. Musk rebuffed suggestions that he was operating without oversight and said he intended to bring accountability to a civil service that he claimed had gone unchecked.
Musk: "We will make mistakes. But we'll act quickly to correct any mistakes."

The Musk revolution
Rafael Behr

Germany used to be held up as a model of collective atonement for Nazi crimes. That has not thwarted the rise of Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) to second place in opinion polls going into federal parliamentary elections on February 23.
Elon Musk routinely boosts the AfD from his X platform. He has commercial and ideological incentives to meddle in German politics. The AfD is committed to low taxes and deregulation, as well as mass expulsion of migrants and rapprochement with Russia.
Musk seems attracted to the far right in Germany because that is where a breach of the cultural firebreak has the most symbolic potency. To an audience of AfD activists, he declared: "There is too much focus on past guilt. We need to move beyond that."
Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel: "There will be no reactionary restoration of the pre-internet past."
Palantir CEO Alex Karp: "There's a revolution. Some people are going to get their heads cut off."
The lessons of history may have to be relearned the hard way.

AR Ominous signs of things to come: America is on the path to becoming a rogue state that outdoes even Nazi Germany.

 

Firefly Aerospace
The Blue Ghost spacecraft has captured its first images of the Moon from the spacecraft's orbit around Earth.
Firefly released a video of Earth eclipsing the Moon. The lunar lander is expected to touch down on March 2.
 

2025 February 9

God

Ross Douthat

A compelling case for God is the evidence for cosmic design in the fundamental laws and structure of the universe and the unusual place of human consciousness within it.
The parameters of the cosmos have been apparently tuned very finely to allow for the emergence of basic order and eventually stars, planets, and complex life.
The multiverse answers the apparent odds against our own universe appearing accidentally by postulating a bazillion universes that we can't see or taste or touch. We're in a universe capable of sustaining living observers because it's the only kind where we could exist.
But we're in a universe that's deeply intelligible to us, a cosmos whose rules and systems we can penetrate, whose invisible architecture we can map, whose biological codes we can rewrite, and whose fundamental physical building blocks we can isolate.
The success of human reasoning is remarkable even if you assume that evolutionary pressure suffices to explain a modest form of successful reasoning. In many potential universes, those capacities would have hit a ceiling in terms of what they could accomplish.
The intelligibility of the cosmos is an argument not only that God exists but also that his infinite mind and our finite minds have some important connection.

God ain't human
MailOnline

In popular culture, God has long been portrayed as an old bearded man. In the Bible, God is referred to as "he" and "him" and even depicted in white robes.
Religious experts say God does not exist either as a man or as a woman, but instead exists in a subjective sense and not in a human form.
Theologian Ilia Delio: "We have anthropomorphized God − making God into a superman, the big guy in the sky we can either accept or reject .. But this is .. a projection of our need for a god .. God is not an object to argue about but the ground of all that is, not beholden to the limits of the human mind."
Anthropologist Alexandros Batalias: "There is no way to construct an argument or theory that can objectively prove the existence of God, as God is not an object to be analyzed or measured."
Many scientists agree there is no experiment that could detect God. Most agree that the universe sprang into existence with the Big Bang some 14 billion years ago.
Cosmologist Stephen Hawking: "It is not necessary to invoke God to .. set the universe going. Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing."
Biologist Richard Dawkins: "There is something infantile in the presumption that somebody else has a responsibility to give your life meaning and point."

AR Ross loses the argument. He's human and can't imagine how we can be so successful. Well, there are billions of us, so together we can do more, just as his brain can do more than a gnat's brain.
If there were billions more, with superhuman AI and so on, we'd be so successful it would blow his mind, but we'd still know a drop in the ocean. Being God is way beyond all that.
 

2025 February 6

Cut US$2 Trillion Nuke Plan

Dan Vergano

DOGE czar Elon Musk said he would trim $2 trillion from the federal budget. He can make the cuts on nuclear weapons.
POTUS Donald Trump called in January for talks on reducing nuclear weapons with China and Russia: "Tremendous amounts of money are being spent on nuclear, and the destructive capability is something that we don't even want to talk about .. it's too depressing."
More nuclear weapons make us less safe. A nuclear war would bring hundreds of millions of immediate deaths, followed by nuclear winter starving billions. Even a limited nuclear war would cause global famine.
China is ratcheting up its nuclear forces over fears of a US first strike. Russia has signaled it wants to head off a nuclear weapons buildup. Conditions are ripe for a Trump deal that prevents a three-way rerun of the cold war arms race.
Project 2025 called for POTUS to expand and modernize the US nuclear force, but the call wasn't in the MAGA pitch.
By nixing nuke modernization, Musk could take a $2 trillion bite out of the federal budget.

AR Perfect! Memo to Musk: Do it.
 

2025 February 4

Waves in an Impossible Sea

Andy Ross

The Higgs mechanism is responsible for the rest mass of everything in the universe. Explaining what this means is the challenge Matt Strassler sets himself in this book. So far as he can without math, he succeeds, but there are caveats.
Modern physics hangs together in a tightly woven fabric. To understand anything, you have to understand everything, at some level. But any level short of the deepest leaves big gaps and problems unanswered, and the latest level the professionals have reached leaves the worst gaps and problems of all.
Strassler is disarmingly honest about this. His presentation of the background to Newtonian physics is excellent at the "physics for poets" level, but when he tries to explain special relativity and quantum mechanics at this level, it begins to go wrong. By the time he reaches the Higgs field and its mechanism, the poets are lost. His story is better than others out there, but without the math it still makes little sense.
To tell the story even this far, Strassler takes the reader on a tour of all of modern physics, guided by what he calls Einstein's Haiku: "E equals h f, And E equals m c squared; From these seeds, the world." Charming, but explaining these two equations without math turns them into magic potions.
The book is fun to read, and I enjoyed it. Strassler knows his audience, has reader-tested the book, and writes with an engagingly light tone. The book deserves success. But don't expect to be much the wiser after reading it.
 

2025 February 2

DeepSeek AI

Melissa Heikkilä

DeepSeek adopted a series of efficient techniques to develop R1, which generates accurate answers by taking time to think about its responses.
LLMs are built in two stages: pre-training (massive data sets help models to predict the next word in a sentence) and post-training (the model is taught to follow instructions).
DeepSeek also used reinforcement learning from human feedback: Human annotators label the AI model's responses to prompts and pick the best responses. Reinforcement learning (RL) rewards the AI model for doing the right thing, but it's often slow and expensive.
DeepSeek first developed the text-predicting model V3, then used RL to reward the model. The model eventually solved problems without human supervision, re-evaluated its answers, and adjusted its processing time to solve different questions.
DeepSeek found its distilled models are strong on reasoning benchmarks.

Cheap, powerful Chinese AI for all
John Naughton

China has caught up with the leading US AI labs: DeepSeek R1 is a powerful AI assistant that's much cheaper to train and operate than the dominant models of the US tech giants.
The low costs of R1 will turbocharge US anxiety that the emergence of powerful and cheap Chinese AI could upend the economics of the industry. AI technology will be commoditized.
DeepSeek pulled this off despite the ferocious technology bans imposed by the first Trump administration. R1 is distributed under the permissive MIT licence: Anyone can use, modify, and commercialize the model without restrictions.
California venture capitalist Marc Andreessen: "DeepSeek R1 is AI's Sputnik moment .. one of the most amazing and impressive breakthroughs I've ever seen .. a profound gift to the world."

Chatbot software limitations
Anil Ananthaswamy

Transformer LLMs trained only to predict the next word in a sequence have hard mathematical bounds for compositional reasoning.
LLMs work with natural language. During training, an LLM is shown a fragment of a sentence with the last word obscured, predicts the missing information, and learns from its mistakes.
The largest LLMs train on almost all the available data on the internet. They learn the syntax and much of the semantics of written language. Such pre-trained models can be fine-tuned to complete sophisticated tasks, yet fail badly at basic multiplication.
Binghui Peng et al proved that an LLM with only one transformer layer is mathematically limited and that multilayer transformers cannot solve certain complicated compositional tasks.
One way to overcome these limitations, beyond just increasing the size of the model, is to provide a step-by-step solution of a problem within the prompt, a technique known as chain-of-thought prompting.
Haotian Ye et al modeled the behavior of transformers with and without chain-of-thought prompting and showed how chain-of-thought prompting turns a large problem into a sequence of smaller problems, enabling transformers to tackle more complex compositional tasks.
LLMs match patterns, and their abilities have mathematical boundaries: You can always find compositional tasks with complexity beyond a given system's abilities.

AR The DeepSeek team deserves our congratulations. How the Chinese or the American governments react is something else. The technology with change the world independently of anything they decide in the next few years. Let's hope AI ends up working for the good of humanity.

 

AR
Five years ago, the UK government committed Brexit.
Centre for European Reform economist John Springford: "Brexit has hurt trade and investment ..
in the long run the economy will be around 4% smaller than if Britain had stayed in."
CER director Charles Grant: "The government has not yet worked out what it wants
in terms of the economic relationship with the EU."

AR I see Brexit as an atrocious national betrayal of good friends in Europe.
The UK is not a viable loner in the modern world.
HMG: Signal the ambition to Rejoin!
 

2025 January 29

Year of the Snake

AFP

Hundreds of millions of people across Asia celebrate the lunar new year today.
 

2025 January 28

DeepSeek AI

research@deepseek.com

DeepSeek‑V3 is a strong large language model with 671 billion parameters, 37 billion activated for each token. It adopts multi-head latent attention and mixture-of-experts architectures, which were thoroughly validated in DeepSeek‑V2.
DeepSeek-V3 pioneers an auxiliary-loss-free strategy for load balancing and sets a multi-token prediction training objective for stronger performance. It is pre-trained on 14.8 trillion diverse and high-quality tokens, followed by supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning stages.
Comprehensive evaluations reveal that DeepSeek‑V3 outperforms other open-source models and achieves performance comparable to leading closed-source models.
Despite its excellent performance, DeepSeek-V3 requires only 2.788 million H800 GPU hours for its full training. Its training process is remarkably stable.

Chinese AI startup DeepSeek Is competing with Silicon Valley giants
Cade Metz, Meaghan Tobin

Last December, DeepSeek unveiled a new AI system. Its chatbot answered questions, solved logic problems, and wrote its own computer programs as capably as system on the market, according to American AI benchmark tests.
The Chinese engineers needed only about $6 million in compute to build their system. Experts had said no company could compete with the market leaders without spending hundreds of millions of dollars on specialized chips.
DeepSeek is known in China for scooping up talent fresh from top universities with the promise of high salaries and interesting research. It has open sourced its latest AI system.
University of California, Berkeley professor of computer science Ion Stoica: "The center of gravity of the open source community has been moving to China."
Toronto technology consultant Reuven Cohen says DeepSeek‑V3 is comparable to the latest systems from OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic − and much cheaper to use.

Nvidia sheds more than $600 billion in value as DeepSeek sparks market rout
Financial Times

DeepSeek attributes its success to methods that allow the AI model to selectively focus on specific parts of input data. For its latest R1 model, it used a reinforcement learning technique in which models teach themselves how to improve without human supervision.
Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark: "There's now an open weight model floating around the internet which you can use to bootstrap any other sufficiently powerful base model into being an AI reasoner."

Trump says DeepSeek chatbot is a 'wake-up call'
Mark Sweney

The launch of DeepSeek's R1 chatbot, built at a fraction of the cost of US competitors, wiped $1 trillion in value from the leading US tech index on Monday. Nvidia had $600 billion wiped off in the biggest one-day fall in US stock market history.
On Monday, the DeepSeek assistant surpassed ChatGPT in downloads from the Apple app store.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman: "DeepSeek's R1 is an impressive model, particularly around what they're able to deliver for the price. We will obviously deliver much better models."

AR I could see something like this coming. Most AI systems waste resources on a prodigious scale, and huge increases in efficiency were to be expected. So investing heavily in hardware was risky.
That Chinese engineers got there first is also no surprise to me. I saw how good they could be when I was at SAP. This will be a Sputnik moment for Americans.

 

⦿ Henryk Makarewicz/United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
 

2025 Holocaust Memorial Day

Red army troops liberated Auschwitz 80 years ago today.
 

2025 January 26

Mystic Ecstasy

Rowan Williams

Simon Critchley discusses the human response to the world that is ecstasy: "It is impossible to be an atheist when listening to the music one loves."
He sees aesthetic experience and the mystical as closely aligned. The self is shown to be caught up in a patterned flow of life that shapes and suffuses the standpoint of the self.
Speaking about the divine (or the unconditioned for a Buddhist) involves accepting that it is not an object among others and cannot be included in any category of existing beings.
For Julian of Norwich, love precedes creation. To dwell in eternal love we must unravel the self. Something in us never falls away from God.

AR The divine, the unconditioned, endless love − words fail at this level.

 

Buckingham Palace
King Charles III poses with no pants on for a selfie to celebrate Burns Night, January 25
 

2025 January 24

Concept Cells

Yasemin Saplakoglu

A grandmother cell is a hypothetical neuron among the 86 billion in your brain that codes for one of your grandmothers. If you delete it, everything you know about her disappears from your brain.
Rodrigo Quian Quiroga showed patients images of places and people, including Jennifer Aniston, and found in each of their brains a neuron that responded to the actor. He found that the same neuron fired for all the Aniston photos but not for images of other actors or objects.
The brain can distinguish an estimated 20,000 semantic concepts, so millions of cells would code for every concept, and each concept cell would code for dozens of related concepts.
Christof Koch: "When your brain encounters things all the time − even high-level things like dogs and cats and people and trees and ships − we will have neurons for that."
Concept cells are not used for object recognition. They fire after a delay of about 300 ms and dip into a process forming an abstract representation informed by memory. Everyone has a different set of concepts and cells for them.
In 2012, Quiroga published his hypothesis that the brain uses concept cells to convert information from the world into memory. He proposed that concept cells might link together to form new associations and form building blocks for memories.
Concept cells may link specific objects to locations in our long-term memory. The firing patterns of concept cells and location cells correlate with the ability to remember an object's location. Concept cells are also linked to working memory.
Researchers debate how concept neurons fit in with other models of how the brain represents the external world. Concepts are represented at different scales in the brain.

AR All this seems about as I'd expect, given the overall architecture of the brain and of artificial neural networks that mimic some of its functions.
 

2025 January 22

Europe

Jakub Krupa

Polish prime minister Donald Tusk, speaking in the European Parliament: "We are dealing with an active conflict on our borders. We have to deal with technological progress .. Europe should not be fearful about its future .. what is happening around us ... is a whole new set of challenges for Europe. But Europe was created exactly to face such challenges."
German CDU leader Friedrich Merz, speaking at the WEF in Davos, on POTUS 47: "I think he'll be ready to do business, also with the Europeans. He's a dealmaker, so let's think about what we can offer .. As soon as we have a common European position we'll be seen as a strong partner."

AR Europe can face its challenges if its nation states have a common position. The UK will get nowhere with POTUS 47 on issues involving Europe, such as defending against Russian aggression, unless it aligns with the EU position. POTUS 47 will aim to divide and conquer.

 

POOL
POTUS 47 Donald Trump delivers his inaugural address in the Capitol Rotunda, Washington, 2024-01-20
 

2025 January 19

The New Overlord

Maureen Dowd

"Trump is returning as a colossus. He has brought Washington − Democrats and Republicans − to heel, teamed up with Elon Musk and slapped a gold 'Trump' sign on Silicon Valley. The lords of the cloud helped fund the coronation, and they are making a pilgrimage here to bow to their new overlord."

AR Trump has been captured by the tech bros (the billionaire cloud oligarchy) as gently as a spent SpaceX Starship booster is captured by its launch tower. America is now a plutocracy run by its big corporations for their own benefit. Perhaps the benefits will trickle down to the masses − but we've seen how trickle-down works for decades. It doesn't. Mazel tov!

 

New Scientist
 

2025 January 15

Critical Theory

Peter Gordon

Critical theory began in the Institute for Social Research, founded in Frankfurt in 1923. The theory drew on the legacy of German idealism, from Kant and Hegel, and from the materialist transformation of left Hegelianism developed by Marx.
Institute member Theodor Adorno spent the Third Reich years in California. He became skeptical about technological optimism and thought economism reflects an ideology of unfreedom by eternalizing the experience of ourselves as objects locked in a deterministic mechanism.
Adorno did not believe that current conditions permit us to grasp unblemished standards. The norms we invoke in criticism are damaged. Critical theory offers partial or incomplete insights but sustains our openness to contradiction.

AR I made a token effort to read works of critical theory by members of the Frankfurt school, though I soon decided it was a mishmash of fuzzy and tendentious thinking and abandoned the effort.
Looking back from 40−50 years on, I'm glad I wasted no more time with it. Adorno's writings had some interest, but little of value from it remains in my head.
 

2025 January 14

Stand by Ukraine

Lloyd Austin, Antony Blinken

President Vladimir Putin of Russia appalled the world with his full-scale invasion of Ukraine. He has failed to achieve any of his strategic goals.
American leadership has rallied allies and partners worldwide to help Ukraine survive. Putin assumed that the world would stand by when he sent his troops across the Ukrainian border.
Ukraine has fought brilliantly. Its success to date is a huge strategic achievement. The Ukrainian people have shown magnificent defiance.
Russia is suffering huge losses to seize small slivers of territory. Putin must either endure high casualties for minimal gains or negotiate to end his war.
We are backstopping Ukraine with economic support. Russian banks are sanctioned. Inflation in Russia is over 9% and interest rates are 21%.
A durable peace will ensure Ukrainians can deter further Russian aggression, defend their territory, and thrive as a sovereign democracy.
Pursuing a policy of peace through strength is vital.

AR Austin is US secretary of defense and Blinken is US secretary of state. They fear the incoming administration might undo all their good work with a botched peace deal that surrenders Ukraine and endangers all of us by rewarding Putin. I share their concern and their conclusion.

 

NATO
NATO Very High Readiness Joint Task Force exercise Brilliant Jump, Drawsko Pomorskie, Poland, 2024
 

2025 January 12

Raise NATO Spending

Raphael Minder

Warsaw is backing Donald Trump's demand for NATO countries to spend 5% of GDP on defence − even if it takes 10 years for some.
Polish defence minister Władysław Kosiniak‑Kamysz says Poland can be the link between Trump's challenge and its implementation in Europe. Poland will spend 4.7% of GDP for defence this year.
After Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Poland doubled its defence spending and ordered billions of dollars of mostly US and South Korean weapons.
Poland's six-month rotating presidency of the EU started on January 1. Poland will urge EU member states to spend €100 billion from the next common budget on defence.
Kosiniak‑Kamysz: "The EU has the capacity .. we must surely find the money to protect ourselves from war."

'Alice für Deutschland'
Laura Pitel

The co-leader of the Alternative for Germany party called for mass deportations of immigrants yesterday as the AfD launched its program for next month's nationwide elections.
In a speech in Riesa in Sachsen, Alice Weidel said that under the AfD − second in the polls with a vote share of around 20% − Germany would see repatriations on a large scale.
Weidel, the AfD candidate for chancellor in the elections, used the term "remigration" for the policy, defined as forcibly removing immigrants who break the law or refuse to integrate, regardless of their citizenship status. Critics say it is akin to ethnic cleansing.
Weidel was met with loud applause from party delegates, who shouted: "Alice für Deutschland!"
Weidel, a former Goldman Sachs analyst, is the face of a party that includes radicals classified as right‑wing extremists by the Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz.
Weidel also called for reopening the Nord Stream gas pipeline from Russia to Germany, restarting nuclear plants, and ending gender studies programs.

AR I agree that 5% should be the target − at least until Trump has done a decent deal with Putin (which probably won't happen − unless the word "decent" changes its meaning).
As for Alice, her party still stinks. She might go down well with Trump and Musk, but she'd do a dirty deal with Putin that left Ukraine and most of eastern Europe in the lurch.
My recipe for peace in Europe: Negotiate from strength (via 5%) with the Russians.

 

Xinhua
China − workshop of the world
 

2025 January 9

China Winning

Robert D Atkinson

China aims to overtake the United States as the world's most advanced economy. American policymakers are only slowly waking up to the reality of an industrial war.
China's rate of progress in production and innovation across a wide range of industries is striking. China is weaponizing its roughly $18 trillion economy, using a vast array of policy tools to increase its relative economic power.
In such advanced industries as semiconductors, robotics, artificial intelligence, quantum computing, space, and chemicals, China is making progress toward the global leading edge of innovation. In some industries, such as electric vehicles and commercial nuclear power, Chinese companies now lead.
China installed more industrial robots last year and has more nuclear power plants under construction than the rest of the world combined. It has spent three times as much on semi­conductor subsidies as the United States and is spending more on the development of quantum technology than any other government.
America must expand its competitiveness in a range of industries. It needs closer collaboration among allied nations to push back on China's power trade practices. America depends on many industries that cannot thrive without access to global markets.
China will not end its power trade regime until it has gained dominance across a wide range of advanced industries.

AR China is well organized and its people are industrious. Good for them. Americans under the erratic and volatile leadership of Trump and Musk will be hard pressed to fight back effectively − the organizational heft and solidarity just isn't there.

 

SpaceX
Starship launches on a test flight
 

2025 January 6

SpaceX Starship

Science

The Starship rocket is a 120 m stick of stainless steel with 33 engines. Following a 420 s test flight on 2024‑10‑13, its booster stage fell out of the sky, relit some of its engines to slow itself nearly to a hover, and was retrieved by its launch tower.
SpaceX, the rocket company founded and run by Elon Musk, has already cut the price of getting cargo into orbit by about a factor of 10 with its Falcon rockets. A fully reusable Starship is expected to cut that price by another order of magnitude.
Musk aims to put people on Mars. For NASA missions, routine Starship flights will enable scientists to take more chances: not one Mars rover, but a herd of them, or a fleet of mirror segments self-assembling into a giant space telescope.

Starship rocket is beating NASA
Robin McKie

Starship is the most powerful launcher ever built, and designed to be fully and rapidly reusable. SpaceX engineers can now reclaim and reuse its main booster stage and aims to do the same for its upper stage this year.
A total of 25 flights are planned for the year ahead. Musk hopes to use his Starship to begin the colonization of Mars. He says SpaceX will launch the first uncrewed Starship missions to Mars within two years.
Astrophysicist Martin Rees: "It's a dangerous delusion to think that space offers an escape from Earth's problems .. Coping with climate change may seem daunting, but it's a doddle compared to terraforming Mars."

AR Musk the tech entreneur is a hero, Musk the political activists is a dangerous loose cannon.
His recent forays into UK politics have been impulsive and potentially damaging. In December, Musk proclaimed on X: "Free Tommy Robinson!"
If Musk's aim is to light a fuse to start a conflagration that destroys Islamism in the UK, freeing TR might be a good start. But the risk that TR will only cause chaos and mayhem is too high.
Musk's latest target is his friend Nigel Farage, whose party Reform UK he is thinking about funding in a bid to topple the present Labour government.
Musk on X: "The Reform party needs a new leader. Farage doesn't have what it takes."
I'm cheered that Musk has turned against the old Brexit warhorse, but ..

 

AR
Poole Bay in the new year, Thursday afternoon
 

2025 January 4

2025
= (20 + 25)²
= (1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + 5 + 6 + 7 + 8 + 9)²
= 1³ + 2³ + 3³ + 4³ + 5³ + 6³ + 7³ + 8³ + 9³

AR Yeah, verily!
 

2025 January 2

Finding God 2

Leopold Kronecker

Die ganzen Zahlen hat der liebe Gott gemacht, alles andere ist Menschenwerk.

AR I read this as evidence for the introspected phenomenology of mathematics.
 

2025 January 1

Finding God

Peter Savodnik

Ayaan Hirsi Ali was born a Muslim in Somalia in 1969. She later fled to the Netherlands as a political refugee and became a famous atheist and critic of Islam.
She recalls talking with Roger Scruton in 2020. He told her: "If you don't believe in God, at least believe in beauty .. The greatest works of art have been inspired by some connection to God."
In 2023, Hirsi Ali published an essay, Why I Am Now a Christian.

Wrestling with God
Matt McManus

Jordan Peterson's book We Who Wrestle With God offers a bifurcation of the world into Cain and Abel: "The .. Jacobins who first planned the French Revolution .. were the spiritual descendants of Cain. Karl Marx is Cain to the core."
Peterson denounces the Left as resentful, genocidal, idiotic, and so on. He owes a debt to German conservative thinkers like GWF Hegel, Friedrich Nietzsche, Carl Jung, and Martin Heidegger.
For Peterson, God doesn't much like Marxists, trans people, environmentalists, atheists, materialists, wokeness, or porn. But God likes billionaires who don't love or worship money.
Peterson admires Leo Tolstoy, who underwent a conversion and developed a radical brand of Christianity that was fiercely utopian and egalitarian. Tolstoy read injunctions to turn the other cheek or give up all your wealth to the poor as requiring immense social changes.
Peterson says a person is more likely to lead a flourishing life by asking what they can do, rather than being resentful over what they can't. His new book is an opiate for the masses.

AR Fascinating .. Christianity is certainly an order of magnitude better than Islam. But Peterson's attempt to breathe new life into the Old Testament tyrant is hopeless. If this is what an anti-woke psychologist is reduced to, he'd be better off staying silent until he's learned more wisdom.