Up From Facebook

I’ll admit up front that I’ve always considered William F. Buckley Jr a pretentious gasbag. I recently finished reading “Buckley: The life and the revolution that changed America” by Sam Tanenhaus. I found little in this long and detailed biography to change my mind. Don’t get me wrong: I enjoyed this book. And I learned a great deal about the subject. For example, English was Buckley’s third language, after Spanish and French. He spoke Spanish exclusively until age six. For his entire life, he was a devout and unswerving Roman Catholic. He was born into wealth, and while his magazine National Review struggled financially for its first decades, he didn’t take a salary and subsidized the journal by his outside writing and speaking fees. Buckley was a man of appetites: sailing, skiing and writing. Reading, not so much. He very rarely changed his mind. The most notable exception was on civil rights. Late in life he admitted that federal intervention was necessary to secure minority rights...

I've never been a fan of pro sports or college sports. It's pretty obvious that college sports have become a farm system for pro sports, and that college players have been exploited to subsidize a revenue stream (both direct income and alumni philanthropy) for colleges.   "College sports have been reeling in the wake of the 2025 court settlement allowing colleges to directly pay players for their name, image and likeness. The fallout has reshaped the industry and led to football roster payrolls that can exceed $40 million." Now congress wants to regulate college sports. No less a free enterprise champion than Rafael "Ted" Cruz supports big gummint when it comes to making sure the money still flows up and not down.  Why not leave players and universities to the "free market?" If the system is in danger of collapse, perhaps the pro team owners can chip in a few billion. Or maybe colleges and universities can refocus on their education mission. https:...

My concern with AI companies’ current attempts to mitigate misalignment is that these efforts may only hide it, by rewarding and selecting the AIs that cheat without getting caught. We should certainly continue research toward better monitoring of AIs' actions, their chains of thought, and the activity inside their networks. But as capabilities grow, those defenses may prove inadequate, just as the world's imperfect cybersecurity has against the AI attackers that outperformed human teams this year. Patching each new misaligned behavior and strengthening our monitors is useful in the short term, but the whack-a-mole game is likely to fail as the AIs' ability to optimize and collaborate approaches and surpasses ours. At some point we may not notice the cheating anymore. ~Yoshua Bengio  

I was in college during the dawning of molecular cloning. By 1981, I was using recombinant DNA in my PhD research, and within a few months of starting my postdoc in 1982, I was engineering clones. In my career, I’ve made libraries of recombinant DNA molecules in bacteria and engineered dozens of transgenic fruit flies. The current fears over unregulated AI reminded me immediately of the fears raised about recombinant DNA technology in the 1970s. “ In two urgent letters in   1973   and   1974 , scientists first called for “prudence” — the same word used this month by Anthropic’s Dario Amodei in his 3,800-word plea for regulation of A.I. Then   they called   for a moratorium on all recombinant DNA work until it could be done safely. “ Work stopped until scientists gathered at Asilomar aiming to come up with regulations to end the moratorium. Organizers warned the group, which included scientists from other countries including the Soviet Union, that if they couldn’...

Kissinger and Nixon went to Peking like barbarians approaching the Manchu emperors. They set a pattern of deference bordering on obsequiousness which has run through Western approaches to China ever since. ~William F. Buckley, Jr. As William Faulkner wrote, the past isn’t dead, it isn’t even past.

The war raised the price of gasoline; the president said it would last a few weeks; it has lasted seven months and,  per YouGov , a majority of Americans now expect it to outlast the year. Even  Fox News  found  71 percent of voters — including 43 percent of Republicans — concluding he has no plan to end it . Seventy-eight percent, in CNN’s poll, say he is not doing enough to end it. The president’s own resolution of this difficulty, offered earlier this month, was to pledge that the war will end “immediately after” the election, which is the closest an American president has come to putting a bomb on layaway. ~Mike Brock