"Connect," indeed

I have long dug Jacob Soboroff's work. Loving his new perch on MSNOW. He has this cool new schtick he does where he goes to various farmers' markets to just walk around and randomly buttonhole people asking for their opinions regarding where a variety of current socioeconomic-political issues might be headed. Goofing on Polymarkets and Kalshi, etc online betting apps, he calls it "Prediction Markets."

 

Love it.

 

I was watching his show this morning, and one guest he interviewed was UPenn Law Professor Kermit Roosevelt III.

Sheee-it. Having just finished the voluminous Hagerman-Swan book Regime Change, I'm tired, y'all (I've concomitantly had 3 other topically related new books in play as well delving into Your Favorite President).

 

Nonetheless, The Power of Kindle 1-Click Compels Me. I'm now up through MLK and Malcolm X on the Mall in 1964 (pre-green algae era).

QUICK UPDATE

 

I got hooked on Dr. Kermit's book and am now well into it.

 

Yeah, our personal and aggregate life "stories." One immediate reaction: I am reflexively reminded of Steiner's 1976 Scripts People Live.

 

Steiner summation: To the extent you are the star/hero/victim in your own developmentally acquired melodrama, you are incapable of fully rational moral agency. "notandus, ergo sum," anyone?
 

Stories. Still largely how we “communicate,” given the bulk of human social history.

 

e.g., see

 

The world is full of theories of everything. The smartphone theory of everything argues that our personal devices are responsible for the rise of political polarization, anxiety, depression, and conspiracy theories—not to mention the decline of attention spans, intelligence, happiness, and general comity. The housing theory of everything pins inequality, climate change, obesity, and declining fertility on the West’s inability to build enough homes. If you treat theories of everything as literal theories of everything, you will be disappointed to find that they all have holes. I prefer to think of them as exercises in thinking through the ways that single phenomena can have large and unpredictable second-order effects.

My new favorite theory of everything is the orality theory of everything. This theory emerges from the work of mid-20th-century media theorists, especially Walter Ong and Marshall McLuhan. They argued that the invention of the alphabet and the rise of literacy were among the most important events in human history. These developments shifted communications from an age of orality—in which all information was spoken and all learning was social—to an age of literacy, in which writing could fix words in place, allowing people to write alone, read alone, and develop ever more complicated ideas that would have been impossible to memorize. The age of orality was an age of social storytelling and flexible cultural memory. The age of literacy made possible a set of abstract systems of thought—calculus, physics, advanced biology, quantum mechanics—that form the basis of all modern technology. But that’s not all, Ong and his ilk said. Literacy literally restructured our consciousness, and the demise of literate culture—the decline of reading and the rise of social media—is again transforming what it feels like to be a thinking person…

Yeah, man. I once had a prominent trial attorney visit our UTK senior seminar in Psychology of Law who simply noted "he with the best story wins."

 

He was pretty much right.

More tomorrow. Stay tuned... 

Asked and “answered.”

Here is president Trump during his Oval Office meeting on June 24th, 2026 with NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte, “responding” to a press question about the DC Reflecting Pool mishap. He rambled on meanderingly for about 11 minutes, repeatedly recapping his “greatest hits” of off-topic indelible grievances.

“The pool? Yes. It's in great shape. No. Ready? Thugs. They just told me a little while ago. Six have been arrested and like six or seven are under arrest. They have pictures and everything else. They went to the bottom and it's not a paint job. It's very expensive. It's not rubber but it's like rubber. And they went down with probably a box cutter or a very sharp razor of some kind of a knife. They cut and then they started ripping it up. You know why? Because there's sick people. And then the side of the pool, right at the water level, they took razors and they started cutting this very expensive stuff. It's incredible stuff. It's beautiful. And it's still beautiful. We have one area where they cut it. It's still holding. It's not leaking. But they hurt it so probably maybe after July 4th or maybe before. I don't know. We'll let a little water out because it's at the edge. They'll cut it. They'll replace it and it'll be as good as new. But these people should go to jail for a long time. You know, there's a statute that I saw when I had my first here that if you do anything to hurt statues or monuments, fountains in Washington, D.C. or federal fountain, it's actually federal all over the country. But you go to jail for 10 years and there's no shortcuts. In other words, it's not five years for good behavior. It's a very tough statute. And so tough that it really hasn't been used very much over the years. But I used it when they had a problem in Washington where they were trying to hurt — the sickos, would try to hurt things, and I announced it. As soon as I announced it, read it, announced it. And I said, 10 years for anybody, everybody dropped what they had, including ropes. They had ropes. They were tying ropes around Thomas Jefferson's head, Andrew Jackson right up there, a rope around his head on that incredible statue. I said, as soon as I invoked it, everybody left, that's still in play. They could go to jail for 10 years. They better be careful. They have a gash on that beautiful pool. It's a reflecting point. This is a very expensive material. Then on top of it, we did a much bigger job than we said we were going to do because we did all the outer areas. We did a beautiful job. It's like a piece of glass. And for some reason, this disturbed the radical left lunatics. You know, the guy that one of the guys, he's a member or a big pair to Act Blue. He's a big Hillary supporter. He's a big supporter of Sleepy Joe Biden. No, this is a very political thing. But as I understand it, six are under arrest. This was pure vandalism. It's an amazing thing that we did. Don't forget, it hasn't worked properly since it was built because it always leaked in 1922. So it was built in 1922. So that's 100 years more ago. It's never worked properly. I always said, had great potential. And I said in my first term, I'm going to do something. So Biden and Obama, between the two of them, spent over $100 million. It was a disaster. Obama, because of the environment, took the water from the Potomac, and it was horrible. It was bad. I don't want to have to tell you what happened, but it was really bad. You can read about it. Biden, he didn't have any idea what the hell they were doing because he didn't know what anything was happening. But they spent over $100 million. We spent 14 or 15 in a lot less than that because a lot of these people worked for the Parks Department anyway. So they're going to work. So I would say a lot less. And we put a great surface on it. This is a world-class surface. It looked beautiful. But they came in and they cut it. And then they grabbed it and they pulled it up. That's why it's all ripped. And who would even think of it? They're sick people. So I think they're in big trouble. But here's the bottom line. We temporarily patched it. Even though we stoppedb— it's so good that with all that damage they did, it's not leaking. And it looks really beautiful. I just had pictures taken. It's reflective. It's beautiful. Like it did a week ago. And then we're going to let a little water, because you have to let the water out to fix it. We're going to fix it. And then the water goes back in and won't take long. We may do it before July 4th, or we may do it just after July 4th. Now, we have it a little bit fenced up, because we have a big fireworks this day. And tonight, I'm making a speech. And people like my speeches. But I guess we're going to have a lot of people over there. But tonight, we're going to have a lot of good entertainment. What are the greatest opera singers in the world? We think he's great. Lee Greenwood's going to be singing our favorite song. And we have a lot of great things. But I think I speak at about 7 o'clock tonight. So that's over at the Mall. Now, when the water looks great, but we will do the final fix up. But just remember this. They took razor blades, 350 feet coming from where he comes. They don't do that. They took razor blades. And knives, and they cut patches like that 350 feet long. A lot of them are like a foot, a foot. They cut the lining. And these pictures of the guy bending over. I don't know if anybody saw that. But there're pictures out there. And you say, who would do that? Maybe it's trumped arrangements. You know, we fixed over 50 fountains and monuments in the city. The city is the safest it's ever been ever. We have virtually no crime. We're a crime-free. When I came here, when we came here at the beginning, it was a horrible crime-ridden city. And we have no crime. Everything's fixed. We have new grass. We took so much. Nobody's ever seen anything like everything had graffiti on it. It's all gone. The tents all over the lawns, which were terrible. A royal gun. The fences are all gone because nobody goes on the lawns anymore. But we fixed all this. You know, grass has a life just like people have a life. And we fixed the lawn, and it will be fixed. Now, one of the other things they did a job around the reflecting pool, we have a huge field of grass. They poured acid on the grass. The same people, I guess. They poured acid. So that's in the process. It killed, acid kills grass quickly. So that's me fixed. But the reflecting pool is great, and it's going to look beautiful. It's so sad to see what they did. And then the fake news tries to say, oh, well, it didn't work. Of course, it worked. Everything I does work. What I do works, what I do best, is build. And we fixed — I think it's 52, all over the city talking about it. But you know, the biggest thing is we have one of the safest cities. If you would have come here two years ago, you had a good chance of being mucked all over, very big guy. They would have mucked him up. They would have beat their head like—. That's me. He wouldn't set up never going back. Now you can walk with your beautiful wife. You can walk with your friends. We were losing all our restaurants. Nobody wanted to go out. Even if you got into the restaurant, they'd rob you when you're in. Now you can't get into a restaurant. But the restaurant, too, is a opening restaurant so all over the city. I'm so proud of it. Also, Memphis, take a look at Memphis. Take a look at in Louisiana. Take a look at what's happened. What we've done in Louisiana with New Orleans is incredible. The governor, Governor Landry, called me. They just had morning grow-up. He said, it's the safest morning grow we've had in 75 years. It's great. We've done a good job. And you know what? In Chicago, they had many murders over the last week. Many we could solve. I could make Chicago with this group of strong people, this strong people. That's OK. You know, one thing we got from the Supreme Court, we have merit. So if you have great students, great marks, great scores, great boards, you get into a good college. If you have bad, you don't get into a good one. In other words, it's based on a tough decision for them. But that also applies to the military. We have tough, tough people in the military. And the National Guard has done an incredible job in Washington. And my people have done an incredible job. So if you look at Memphis, crime is down 78%. I have a friend from Memphis who's going to leave. And he called me and said, I've never seen anything like this. It's like a different city. And also in New Orleans, it's like people can't believe it. I could do that for Chicago. I'd love to do Chicago, because Chicago's potentially a great city. But you're going to lose it. It's got to be done. And we do something much more than they can do, because we take people out and bring them back to the country from where they came, where they came out of jails, where they're drug lords and drug dealers, and people from mental institutions. And I'd love to do it in Los Angeles. And I'd love to do it in New York City. I live in New York. I'd like to see that a lot of problems in New York over the last couple of weeks. If we were there, they wouldn't have any of those problems. And we remove the bad people from the city, so they never come back. Now, some liberal people probably don't like the sound of that. But 92% of crime is caused in these cities. It's caused by 2% of the people. I love that number, because it's easily solved. Think of that, 92% of the crime in Washington was caused by 2% of the people. We moved out almost 5,000 career criminals and people from other countries. And Washington now is one of the safest cities, I could say, on the planet. But let's just say, in the US. And it's beautiful now. The reflecting pool, but we have 52. I think it's much more than that. It's going to soon be more than that. You see them opening up. And my team has done an unbelievable job. [Interior Secretary] Doug Burgum has been great. Department of the Interior and his people. Greg, and all — I mean, these people, they're phenomenal. But think of that, you work so hard, you get it open way ahead of your life, what your life was, what was it key. And then somebody's in there with a knife cutting it and ripping the floor. It's terrible. But the 350 foot gash in the side, it's a terrible thing. Ready? Here, I'm going to end on this. I'm so proud of Washington, D.C. It's become one of the hottest cities in the world. But what is the hottest in the world is the United States of America. We have the hottest city. And you know that. You were talking about that. Two years ago, we were laughed at. We were a joke. We were a dead country. Now we're the hottest country anywhere in the world. Thank you very much, everybody.”

On YouTube, at 35 minutes in. Babbleiiciousness on stark, poignant display.

 

BY THE WAY

 

I finished "Regime Change." Read it. Seriously.

Empathy, according to Elon

Elon Musk: The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is the empathy exploit

"There's a guy who posts on the internet who's great, Gad Saad, and he talks about basically suicidal empathy. There's so much empathy that you actually suicide yourself. So we've got civilizational suicidal empathy going on.

I believe in empathy. I think you should care about other people, but you need to have empathy for civilization as a whole and not commit to a civilizational suicide.

The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy. The empathy exploit. They're exploiting a bug in Western civilization, which is the empathy response.

I think empathy is good, but you need to think it through and not just be programmed like a robot. Its weaponized empathy is the issue."

From an Elon Musk podcast interaction with Joe Rogan in 2025 (@1:33:00). CNN news article on the topic here.

 

One scarcely knows where to begin in light of this level of ignorance. I randomly ran across this news item:

 

 

Below, a tweet by an equally clueless Elon-Bro' 

 

SMH...

Pedantically: "Empathy" is NOT s synonym for "sympathy." It refers to one's relative ability to accurately and precisely perceive the world as others do. There are 3 recognized sorta venn-diagram-overlapping clinical substrates: [1] cognitive, [2] affective, and [3] somatic.

 

More ASAP. Spent the entire day on Regime Change. Almost done.

 

UPDATE: OFF-TOPIC ERRATUM

 

The dual earthquakes in Venezuela are so horrifically, tragically sad. The death toll is sure to go well into 5 figures. Nearly 1,000 confirmed dead already, with 51,000 people reported as still missing.

 

notandus, ergo sum

As a young man in New York, Donald Trump was determined to stamp his name onto physical structures. He was Fred Trump’s son, he was on the make, and he wanted to leave his own indelible mark on Manhattan—the wealthiest borough in the city and one his father had never conquered. Putting his name on a gleaming Fifth Avenue tower was an exercise in branding into the American consciousness. For Donald Trump, to be famous was to exist. 

Forty years later and at the pinnacle of American power, the by-now-seventy-nine-year-old Trump was obsessed with dreams of legacy and determined to use the scope of an imperial presidency to imprint his name on everything, including the low-rise cityscape of Washington, D.C. 

By the norms of history, the naming rights for monuments belonged to subsequent generations, and those honors were conferred by Congress, by historians and commissions, and by public acclaim. It was the American way. But Donald Trump had long since demonstrated that he could adore himself far more, and in greater detail, than anyone else might. Why wait? He had watched in rage as his name was removed from buildings in New York City in protest during his first presidency and after its calamitous end. It was a mistake to assume others would praise you for your efforts, he told The New York Times in 1980. “If you let people treat you how they want, you’ll be made a fool,” he said, before adding, “I don’t want to be made anybody’s sucker.” 

John F. Kennedy had never named anything for himself. Nor had any other President in American history openly campaigned for a public structure to bear his name—though a few, like Washington and Hoover, had buildings or landmarks named for them by others while still in office. President Gerald Ford went so far as to refuse to sign a bill that would have renamed a courthouse and federal office building after him. Ford said he knew of no federal buildings that had been named for a President while still in office, and if he were to accept the honor it “might begin a precedent I believe it best not to establish.” 

One of Kennedy’s legacies, together with the First Lady Jackie Kennedy, had been turning the White House into a showcase for American arts and high culture, inviting poets, musicians, actors, and dancers to perform at social events, special concerts, and state dinners. When Kennedy was slain it seemed natural that a nation searching for a way to celebrate his life would name a cultural center in his honor. On January 23, 1964, the National Cultural Center—created by an act of Congress at the end of the Eisenhower administration—was officially renamed the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, to serve as the “sole national memorial” to the thirty-fifth President. 

Since then, the Kennedy Center had served as the cultural center of the capital city, the longtime home of the National Symphony Orchestra and the Washington National Opera, and the host of the world-renowned Kennedy Center Honors. 

In this most political city in the country, the Kennedy Center was for decades managed by a bipartisan board, maintaining a reputation for political neutrality, focused on artistic excellence rather than partisan favor. But Trump had refused to attend the Kennedy Center award ceremony during his first term because so many of the artists had made it clear they were anti-Trump. Now, in his second term, he would not only attend the ceremony, but he would have a hand in picking the honorees. And he would appoint himself the evening’s host. 

When on December 18, 2025, the board of directors of the Kennedy Center had voted unanimously to change the name to “the Donald J. Trump and the John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts,” Trump feigned surprise and humility that the board—which he had personally selected just a few weeks after his second inauguration and of which he was now the chairman—would bestow such an honor. 

The renaming was enthusiastically embraced by Sergio Gor, then the head of the presidential personnel office, but later dispatched as ambassador to India. When Gor raised it with Trump months earlier, the President loved it. You’re doing all this work for the Kennedy Center, Gor had told him flatteringly. You got the money. You should at least get your name on it with JFK. 

The White House quietly ordered the large letters “DONALD J. TRUMP” to be added to the facade well before the board had even rubber-stamped the authorization to rename the building…

Haberman, Maggie; Swan, Jonathan. Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump (pp. 365-367). (Function). Kindle Edition.

Quite the read...

Dissing Maggie

"Maggot?" How juvenile.

 

The Maggie Haberman-Jonathan Swan book was just released.

 

 

Yeah, of course I bought it. Stay tuned...

 

UPDATE

 

I am deep into this book. Very disturbing, even for someone already steeped in Trump critical biographies.

 

A snip from midway through the book:

By midway through the year, a picture was emerging of how the Oval Office operated in Trump’s second term. It was of a President spending his days at the Resolute Desk in a series of rolling bull sessions, accompanied by a core group of intimates; these were supplemented by a rotating cast of extras, and on any given day they could be Republican lawmakers, titans of industry, former pro wrestlers, country musicians, Gulf royals, crypto bros, or friends of felons seeking pardons. They would enter and exit the frame, with some invited to stay for meetings they had no business attending. The conversations ran fast, often straying far from the point, or from anything visitors imagined when they arrived at the White House. The President’s sentences often began on one topic and ended far away. 

The ever-present Natalie Harp was generally on a chair off to the side, her laptop open, head cocked, listening but never contributing unless ordered to by Trump. She fulfilled, in a flash, any request, whether a “Trump 2028” hat needed to be fetched from the merchandise room, a quick Google search, or producing the latest story from right-wing websites like Breitbart or Gateway Pundit. Once Dan Scavino became the head of the Presidential Personnel Office in late 2025, he mostly handed over Trump’s Truth Social account to Harp. 

Most presidents had adhered to the mantra that their most valuable commodity was time. George W. Bush and Barack Obama scheduled their days down to blocks of ten or fifteen minutes. The ideal “gatekeeper” function of a White House chief of staff was to guard those blocks of time against needless interruptions. But Susie Wiles had little interest in micromanaging her boss’s time, perhaps correctly calculating it was futile. She could try to control access to who got into the Oval Office, and what their agenda might be, but otherwise she would let the President set his own pace. 

In Donald Trump’s White House, time was a flexible concept. To outsiders, the administration appeared a hive of activity, but those brought into the Oval Office would often remark that Trump seemed to have all the time in the world. Unless the meeting concerned an imminent military operation, Trump was usually relaxed, gossipy, unhurried. Many visitors to the Oval were charmed. Even those who didn’t like him would often describe the President as solicitous and flattering, offering Diet Cokes and candy as if he were a greeter at one of his clubs. He would tell bawdy jokes and compliment his guests on how good they looked. He signed MAGA hats and extra ones for their kids and would urge them to come to Mar-a-Lago that weekend or to one of his golf clubs. He would spend hours examining the minute details of Oval Office decorations and plans for the ballroom he was plotting on the grounds of the East Wing. He loved showing off the quality of the speakers that piped his music—Pavarotti and Sinéad O’Connor and James Brown—into the Rose Garden patio. And he would regale visitors—especially foreign leaders—with the details of his 2024 election victory, subject them to his familiar litany of complaints about “Sleepy Joe,” and pepper them with questions about the dangerous animals in their countries with the fascination of a child. 

“I still can’t fully describe what the Oval Office is like with him,” said one visitor. “You’d have two people on two different speakerphones. Another person on a cell phone. I’ll never forget talking about a highly classified program, and this guy—looked like just a salt-of-the-earth, country guy—walks in and he’s got samples for the Rose Garden paving. Pops them on the desk. And the President stops what we’re talking about, gets up there, and walks out there with him and I see a lot of hands moving. And he comes back and then looks over our shoulders, and the curator is there with somebody to drill the cherubs into the wall that he had brought up from Mar-a-Lago. And then he goes back to the people on the phone, gives them guidance. And then he tries to come back to us, but we’re out of time.” 

This pattern would repeat all day long. The President’s last three meetings of the day would often blur into one contiguous meeting. Trade, national security, a visiting CEO. All would be mashed together into one borderless conversation. Trump had run his days this way—unstructured and improvisational—since the years he spent working from his corner office in Trump Tower. But in his second term, Trump had made the White House more fully his home—not just fixing it in accordance with his aesthetic, but fundamentally changing the rhythms and structures and operations of the place…

Haberman, Maggie; Swan, Jonathan. Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump (pp. 169-171). (Function). Kindle Edition.

Lordy Mercy... 

The Washington DC Reflecting Pool

 

Donald Loves awards. So I gave him one.

 

Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni smacks down our crude, delusional Bully-in-Chief

 

Mic drop.

 

UPDATE

Italy's Meloni To Trump: 'My Popularity Is None Of Your Concern. I Suggest You Focus On Yours.'

Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni hit back at President Donald Trump's continued insults against her on Saturday, telling Trump to focus on his own dwindling popularity.

"These constant, unprovoked attacks are senseless," Meloni posted on Instagram in response to Trump's comments earlier in the day, where he once again claimed Meloni "asked, over and over, for a picture with me."

Meloni previously called Trump's claim "completely fabricated." On Saturday, she said attempting to be Trump's friend "has certainly not helped" her own popularity.

"As for my popularity, being your friend has certainly not helped it, nor does it depend on my relationship with you," Meloni posted.

"My popularity is none of your concern. I suggest you focus on yours," she added.

"Continuous discursive tinnitus"

An excellent New Yorker long-read. Totally timely.

The person who should have been best able to explain how we got here was the great German philosopher Jürgen Habermas, who illuminated how a feisty, principled public sphere is integral to democracy. But Habermas died in March, at the age of ninety-six, and, although he remained active until his final months, commenting on Ukraine, Gaza, and Eurobonds, he struggled to understand the turn history had taken. As a teen-ager in 1945, he had witnessed American soldiers enter his home town of Gummersbach, near Cologne, carrying messages of freedom and openness. Eight decades later, he watched American voters choose a leader who had advertised his fascistic bent in blood-and-soil rhetoric, fantasies of punitive violence, and a taste for bombastic architectural kitsch. The far right was making inroads across Europe, including in Germany. The print-based media culture that once anchored Habermas’s public sphere had devolved into a digital sludgefest that proved better at circulating racist memes than at fostering morality and dignity. A couple of years before his death, in a conversation with the historian Philipp Felsch, Habermas said that his world was being dismantled “step by step.”...
____ 

...The medieval philosopher al-Farabi, who considered democracy the least imperfect of imperfect governments, is mentioned only in passing. A similar Western bias contributed to one of Habermas’s last, and least effective, public interventions. In November, 2023, after Hamas’s massacre of Israelis and the onset of Israel’s brutal counterstrike on Gaza, Habermas signed a statement that reasserted solidarity between Germany and Israel. After a glancing mention of Palestinian suffering, the authors write, “The standards of judgment slip completely when genocidal intentions are attributed to Israel’s actions.” It’s one thing to deny that genocide has taken place in Gaza; it’s another to imply more broadly that the topic is out of bounds. At a crucial moment, Habermas’s cherished pluralism failed him.

“If no dread remains, the monsters return,” Habermas wrote early in his career. They’re back, on several continents. Earlier this year, in Germany, the Sachsen-Anhalt branch of the far-right Alternative für Deutschland party released a platform containing such demands as “Think German!,” “Promote patriotism—no state money for anti-German art and culture!,” and “Build more beautifully!” This dumbed-down Goebbels gobbledygook revived talking points that Habermas had tried to quash during the Historikerstreit. Not surprisingly, AfD representatives could barely contain their glee over the philosopher’s death. Hans-Thomas Tillschneider, one of the Party’s nastier voices, posted a YouTube video in which he said, “Habermas is dangerous. He is one of the greatest enemies of the German nation.” Tillschneider’s inability to put Habermas into the past tense was somehow reassuring.

An equally obnoxious obituary came from the billionaire pen of Alex Karp, the C.E.O. of Palantir Technologies. Before Karp turned to hawking surveillance systems that have assisted ice in its murderous roundups of immigrants, he studied philosophy under Habermas in Frankfurt. In an article for Politico, Karp recounted how Habermas provided fierce but fair criticism of his papers: “It was his very willingness to be so productively unsparing that reminds me of what we have lost as a culture.” Alas, the losses that Karp has in mind don’t seem to involve learning, rigor, or reason. Waving away Habermas’s cosmopolitan ideals, he says that discourse “must be rooted in a more corporeal and traditional—and indeed national and cultural—source.” This is the language of maga and the AfD, not to mention Heidegger circa 1935. Karp’s ideological atavism is all too typical of the current bent of Silicon Valley...

 

When the A.I. chatbots march in, the “colonization of the lifeworld,” to use another ungainly but apt Habermas phrase, enters a terminal stage. Horkheimer and Adorno had concluded that advanced capitalism, far from being a technocratic monolith, had an inherent tendency toward chaos and madness. A.I. is at once a consummation of technological control and a new level of cultish delirium. The designers themselves are often incapable of explaining what their systems are doing. Habermas’s entire world view was premised on the idea of people learning from one another; A.I. annihilates communicative action in the name of hallucinatory conversations with sycophantic machines. The social effects have proved instantly disastrous: rampant disinformation, mass student cheating, cases of users becoming addicted to A.I. or killing themselves with its help. Meanwhile, to the joy of investors, untold thousands of jobs have vanished. As an added coup, A.I. managed to deliver a personal affront to Habermas a year before his death. In 2024, Google DeepMind unveiled a “Habermas Machine,” which has been described as a “scaffolded pair of LLMs designed to find consensus among people who disagree.” The philosopher had not given Google permission to use his name, and he was horrified when he heard about the scheme...

 

Philosophy is a discipline of abstractions, yet it raises achingly elemental questions. The august Kant asks, “What can I know? What should I do? What can I hope for?” The answers are seldom simple or bright. The seduction of despair can be intense, whether on the personal or the political level. But the fact that most of our hopes remain unrealized should not revoke the reality of our fitful, painful progress.

This was Habermas’s core conviction; he was an incrementalist, though a radical one. On the other hand, in his almost manic drive toward consensus, he blunted the edge of his critical inheritance. If we are to say no to the monstrosities that we have unleashed, we need the uncompromising fury that the Frankfurt School writers invested in their work. We need Adorno to tell us that the confusion of truth and lies “makes it a Sisyphean labor to hold on to the simplest piece of knowledge.” In the end, we need both voices: the critical and the reconstructive, the savage and the sage. The dialectic moves between crashing despair and hovering hope.

That's just a tad.

 

An Iindependence Day question for everyone

Tick, tick, tick...the President flies to Geneva

OK, then...

 

JUNE 17th UPDATE

 

 OK, then...

June 14th, 2026 in our nation's Capital

POSTSCRIPT

Nasdaq: SPCX launch

Whatever. OpenAI, Anthropic, and other huge AI IPOs are soon to follow.

 

From the SPCX SEC.gov S-1 IPO filing form. 

MISSION STATEMENT 

To build the systems and technologies necessary to make life multiplanetary, to understand the true nature of the universe, and to extend the light of consciousness to the stars.

A BIT OF S-1 DETAIL COMMENCING ON PG. 194

AI
Grok
Grok represents a core pillar of our mission to advance humanity’s understanding of the universe through the development of truth-seeking artificial intelligence. Grok is designed and optimized for rigorous reasoning, real-time information synthesis, and transparent outputs, with a product philosophy centered on intellectual honesty, first-principles thinking, and engagement with complex topics.

Grok is designed as a truth-seeking AI model, built on our founder Elon Musk’s mission to enable humanity to understand the universe. We believe that accomplishing this mission requires a truth-seeking approach to AI. 

We define truth seeking as the active, relentless pursuit of what is objectively true about reality, and grounded in evidence, logic, empirical data, and first principles thinking. Our goal is to understand and explain what the universe appears to be doing, as accurately as current knowledge allows. In pursuit of this truth-seeking objective, Grok also enefits from its integration with X, our real-time information, entertainment, and free speech platform. This direct, real-time access to the information and human discourse on X enhances Grok’s truth-seeking capabilities by grounding outputs in up-to-date knowledge and diverse viewpoints.

Since the initial release of Grok 1, we have iterated rapidly, releasing Grok 2, Grok 3, and, the current version, Grok 4, each delivering material improvements in pre-training, reasoning depth, multimodal capabilities, latency, and scale. Building on this trajectory, we expect to continue scaling Grok through subsequent generations. 

Ongoing  training of next‑generation models is expected to scale toward multipletrillions of parameters, which could represent a step change in reasoning in depth and overall intelligence. In this context, the number of parameters refers to the scale of the model, where parameters are the internal numerical values, such as “weights,” that are adjusted during training to enable the model to recognize patterns and relationships in data. A larger number of parameters generally allows the model to capture more complex relationships, store greater amounts of knowledge, and achieve higher levels of reasoning capability. Our accelerated development cadence positions Grok among the fastest-advancing frontier models relative to peers, including OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google. Grok is differentiated by its emphasis on real-time data integration, particularly through insights derived from the X platform (subject to some limitations for certain content), enabling dynamic awareness of current events and user discourse, as well as by explicit investment in reasoning transparency and explainability. Grok enhances the X ecosystem by improving content understanding, personalization, and recommendation systems, thereby increasing user engagement and platform intelligence. We are currently developing next-generation iterations, including Grok 5, which are expected to further expand reasoning fidelity, multimodal integration, and domain-specific performance. 

Terrestrial AI Compute
Our terrestrial AI compute forms the backbone of the Grok model family and is anchored by the COLOSSUS and COLOSSUS II data centers that boast some of the world’s largest and most advanced AI training clusters. COLOSSUS and COLOSSUS II collectively provide approximately 1.0 gigawatt of compute power, with the additional power capacity available for data center operations. We brought the first cluster of COLOSSUS online in 122 days, repurposing the shell of an existing factory, and the first cluster of COLOSSUS II online even faster in 91 days. As an illustrative comparison, an industry benchmark to bring online a 100 megawatt greenfield data center is approximately two years. We also demonstrated a significant improvement in cost efficiency, achieving data center construction costs for COLOSSUS II that are considerably lower than industry benchmarks on a per megawatt basis. COLOSSUS II is capable of operating entirely by our self-built behind-the-meter gigawatt-scale natural gas power plant. Our data centers are integrated with the world’s largest Megapack deployment, providing additional layers of reliability and operating performance. At all our existing data centers we have employed a brownfield retrofit strategy leveraging existing industrial sites, advanced direct-to-chip cooling to support higher rack densities, and high-speed networking. The clusters deploy leading-edge GPUs to maximize training throughput and model performance. The next phase of expansion at COLOSSUS II is designed to train our next-generation Grok 5 AI model. As we continue to expand our AI compute infrastructure, we will also continue to enhance our power capabilities utilizing a combination of grid-power and behind-the-meter natural gas power plant buildouts. At COLOSSUS, our grid power capabilities are designed to purchase power from the grid as available, and to rely on our behind-the-meter, self-generated power and Megapack installations when grid power is curtailed.

X Platform
X is a real-time information, entertainment, and free speech platform that serves as a foundational distribution and data engine for our AI ecosystem. With a global user base generating substantial volumes of content at all times across a wide variety of topics, X provides a uniquely dynamic data for model training and real-time context integration, subject to some limitations for certain content, which significantly differentiates Grok from the other frontier lab offerings.

X is our real-time information, entertainment, and free speech platform that serves as a global town square with integrated AI capabilities powered by Grok. Designed to evolve toward an “everything app,” X enables users to post content, share media, engage in conversations, host, view, and participate in live group discussions, follow real-time events, use encrypted messaging, and leverage advanced features such as Grok-assisted post creation, content discovery, and conversational AI directly within the interface via the prominent Grok icon.

With native integration of Grok’s frontier models, including real-time access to X data for up-to-date insights, trending analysis, and enhanced search, X delivers personalized feeds, smarter recommendations, and low-latency AI assistance for our users worldwide. Our X Premium subscription options, including Basic, Premium and Premium+ tiers, offer expanded features, ad-reduced experiences, and priority Grok interactions. In 2023, Grok’s chat functionality was integrated into the X app allowing for the user to open the chat interface to type prompts and get real time answers.

Public X data enhances Grok’s training and reasoning capabilities, while the platform continues to deliver measurable performance outcomes for advertisers, with an increasing strategic focus on performance-based marketing solutions.

In addition to X consumer products, X offers advertisers and developers a powerful suite of tools to reach highly engaged audiences. Advertisers can target audiences through diverse ad formats—such as Promoted Ads, Vertical Video Ads, Collection Ads, and premium options such as X Amplify and Takeoversblending seamlessly with organic content for authentic engagement. With advanced targeting based on public conversations, events, keywords, interests, locations, and look-alike audiences, brands can connect with audiences while benefiting from flexible, performance-based pricing (pay only for actions such as clicks or engagements) and often lower costs compared to other platforms. We expect that our ongoing innovations—including Grok-powered integrations, new contextual ad tests, and expanded aspect ratio support for easy reuse of ad creative—make X a competitive choice for driving traffic, conversions, and brand awareness and visibility among X’s hundreds of millions of MAUs. Developers have access to a continuous, high-volume, real-time stream of data around current events, trends, or sentiment, which they can access through an official X Developer Platform and APIs.

In April 2026, we began a phased roll-out of our new advertising platform, that we rebuilt from the ground up. The new Ads Manager is built to help advertisers launch better campaigns, faster, with stronger ROI. Powered by AI, the new systems enable more precise, relevant and dynamic ad delivery. Ads are seamlessly integrated into a User’s X feed….

Bring a Snicker's, you're gonna be a while.

 

UPDATE 

 

Pardon my dubiety.

 

Read THIS book.

Also see "Something New, Something Old."

Friday, June 12th: SpaceX IPO day. Also, #WITHpod: Bubblicious time drawing nigh?

IT market collapse coming?
  

 

Excellent discussion. An hour well-spent. Rather frightening, actually. We will not be able to claim that we were not warned. Unsustainable private debt machinations (increasingly exacerbated by corrupt federal financial policies—can you say "subprime debacle on ketamine?").

 

Are the Zombies returning?

 

RELATEDLY

NY Times

Jacob Ward is all over it 

 

In February 2026, SpaceX acquired xAI — Musk’s artificial intelligence company, maker of the Grok chatbot — in an all-stock deal. The acquisition brought xAI’s losses onto SpaceX’s consolidated books. Building, maintaining, and launching rockets is expensive. But in 2025 alone, xAI spent $12.7 billion in capital expenditures — more than the combined $8 billion SpaceX spent on its entire Starlink and rocket launch business. SpaceX posted a net loss of $4.94 billion for the year, a swing of more than $5 billion from the year before. The profitable company became the wallet for the unprofitable one. That’s what this week’s SpaceX IPO is asking the market to fund.

Before we get to whether this is a good bet, we need to be clear about what Musk is actually asking of you, his investors.

He wants your money. He does not want your opinion.

SpaceX is listing under a dual-class share structure. “Dual-class” means two tiers of stock. One class for outside investors, with standard voting rights. One class for Musk and insiders, with dramatically amplified voting power. According to SpaceX’s own S-1 filing, as reported by Reuters, Musk’s Class B super-voting shares give him 85.1% of the voting power of the entire company. You can buy a piece of SpaceX on Friday. You cannot tell SpaceX what to do. Ever…

Gonna be interesting, 'eh?