Monday, July 13, 2026

Coffee Break: Will the Trump Admin Make OpenAI Its Lucky 31st Investment and Bailout Softbank?

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman offered the Trump regime a 5% stake. Will it become the Trump regime’s 31st buy-in in time to save SoftBank?

Trapped at Home: Climate Stress Is More Likely to Immobilize the Poor Than to Move Them

A new study argues that climate change will not produce mass migration of the poor, using debatable assumptions.

The Case of the (France-Sized) Missing Antarctic Ice

“It’s just a question of whether we’re fast enough to stretch out that loss to several thousand years versus dumb enough to keep warming the planet and seeing it collapse very quickly in a century or two.”

Links 7/13/2026

Iran War: What Happens When the US Hits the Limits of Escalation Options?

Today’s Iran war news: The current escalatory trajectory is set to lead only to bad outcomes, yet complacency seems widespread.

Lindsey Graham Bites the Dust 

Leading warmonger dies suddenly immediately upon returning from Ukraine—at least that’s the official line. 

Links 7/12/2026

The Sunday Morning Movie Presents: Hószakadás AKA Snowfall (1974) Run Time: 1H 33M Plus Anil Seth On Why AI Is Not Conscious Plus Bonuses!

Hószakadás is a movie about life and death on the fringes of war.

Machine Gun-Toting Israeli Settlers Detain Ro Khanna During Trip to Occupied West Bank

“These hoodlums come in with machine guns—M4, an American-made machine gun—and they detain us. They block off the road.”

Iran War: Iran Rejects Trump 24 Hour Ultimatum; US Launches Intense Attacks With Kuwait and Bahrain; Iran Closes Strait of Hormuz, Starts Counter-Strikes; Rumors of Mining of Oman Channel

Today’s Iran war news: It looks as if a full-bore war, now over control of the Strait of Hormuz, is on.

Links 7/11/2026

The Graham Platner Affair

A post mortem of the successful effort to end Graham Platner’s Senate bid and any future in politics.

How Stories Change the Human Brain, Empathy, Memory, and Behavior

Yves here. Stories are integral to decision-making. Prosecutors and criminal defense attorneys know well that juries reach their verdicts not on weighing evidence but on constructing the story that seems to them to fit the evidence best and then see what that means in terms of a ruling. It’s thus disconcerting to see how tech […]

Coffee Break: More on American Science, Thomas Jefferson and AI, and Natural History for the Ages

Part the First: Beware of Resting on the Shoulders of Atlas.  Dr. Scott Atlas is a radiologist who is now ensconced in the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace at Stanford (naturally, and in the tower, no less).  One can only surmise from the general run of their work product that (true) Revolution and […]

Cloudflare Threatens to Cut Google Off From Their Publishers in Searches Due to AI Scraping

AI is destroying what is left of search, as Cloudflare plus big publishers implement the nuclear option of cutting off Google indexing.