Holly Brewer

Quietly, calmly and forensically, BBC just dismantled the Trump communications shitshow on Iran.

No hyperbole, just laying out an unprecedented military, diplomatic and reputational shambles.

Worth a watch.

(🎥 BBC News/BBC Verify)

The entire controversy that ended last Friday at 5 pm EST– hours before the US launched a war against Iran —between Hegseth and the head of Anthropic — was about ethical limits on the use of AI to kill people

JamesTalarico to Pete Hegseth in unearthed clip: "I'm asking you to tell your voters right now that Donald Trump lost the election in 2020. Can you admit that?”

Hegseth: “I-it’s not your show…”

Talarico: “Is this an uncomfortable question for you?”

Cartoon by Pedro Molina | Tribune Content Agency

Dana Perino bragged about the Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner pretending they were negotiating with Iran while the Pentagon planned an attack. Witkoff is part of the Ukraine/Russia negotiations .Kushner is part of the plan to rebuild Gaza. Who would trust them after this?

Brilliant. Thanks for writing it. So many excellent points, but especially:

“When the government asserts the right to use powerful AI without vendor-imposed constraints, and punishes the vendor that declines to comply, it eliminates one of the only remaining points of friction in the kill chain.”

On ethics and authority and Hegseth’s invocation of “death and destruction.”

Even *with* the limits that Hegseth wanted removed, Claude misidentified (hallucinated?) a girls school as a target, latest verified updates below.
What did that self-described bringer of “death and destruction,” Pete Hegseth, want to target? On what grounds did Anthropic head say no?
Dystopian

The entire controversy that ended last Friday at 5 pm EST– hours before the US launched a war against Iran —between Hegseth and the head of Anthropic — was about ethical limits on the use of AI to kill people

Susannah Clapp · At the British Museum: ‘Hawaii’ Traditional fabrics bring unifying stories. The most distinctive Hawaiian material, kapa or barkcloth, was wonderfully...

‘There is no dispute about the magnificence of what some will consider specimens and others sacred items. A saffron and rust-coloured feather cape more than five feet long; a whale-tooth ivory pendant.’

Susannah Clapp visits the British Museum’s Hawaii exhibition.

www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

Too many to choose from 🙂 although I absolutely love Mount Stewart, Co.Down (which has very good copies of the Castlereagh Papers btw!)

finally in deep archival mode again after far far too long away

and lord, the more I read by Hamilton the executive officer with Washington's ear, the more bizarre it seems that he's been transmogrified into a prophet of the royal residuum.

Iraq plunged into nationwide blackout as US tells citizens to leave immediately - Türkiye Today Iraq's entire national power grid has collapsed in a total blackout as the country reels from the widening US-Israeli military campaign against Iran

Iraq plunged into nationwide blackout as US tells citizens to leave immediately
www.turkiyetoday.com/region/iraq-...

Hegseth seeming to claim that here too. Scary & wrong

I was a kid, but a friend’s uncle knew people in Hollywood and got free tickets.

Galileo’s handwritten notes found in ancient astronomy text Discovery sheds new light on how famed astronomer came to lead a scientific revolution

I love everything about this! The conviction that a major figure was not struck by a bolt of lightning but worked to understand the system he would ultimately critique and help dismantle. The scholarly sleuthing rare books — all of it. 😎🤓
www.science.org/content/arti...

I saw Star Wars on opening night at Grauman’s Chinese Theater in Los Angeles (May 25 1977)

“‘Nobody gets to hide and give the president an easy pass or an end-run around the Constitution,’ Sen. Tim Kaine, the chief architect of the war powers effort in Congress, said the day before the vote.”

Pearls before swine and all of that.

🔥

[TW: graphic fracture, sound of breaking bone]

Sen Tim Sheehy (R-Montana) badly breaking the arm of a Marine veteran protesting the war Iran.

AOC: We already have multiple American service members who are dead for an illegal action that the president has pursued with no plan out. They don’t know why they got into this war. They’re talking about a hundred different reasons, and they don’t know how they’re getting out.

The “authorities” part is key.
Who authorizes this “death and destruction” and on what grounds?
Reminded of William Blackstone’s admonition to judges: “To shed the blood of our fellow creature is a matter that requires the greatest deliberation, and the fullest conviction of our own authority. …,”

He continues:“The guilt of blood, if any, must lie at their doors, who misinterpret the extent of their warrant; and not at the doors of the subject, who is bound to receive the interpretations, that are given by the sovereign power.” Blackstone 4:11

The fact that POTUS and his “secretary of war” are acting without legislative imprimatur makes it all the more clear that they are taking the role of judges in their own hands.

Vol 4, page 11, from Blackstone’s section on crime and punishment.
His point is: who are we as judges, and on what authority do we act to take peoples’ lives without strong evidence it is justified? Hegseth and POTUS have acted as judges without such evidence, and only assert their authority.

The Province of Legislation Determined A comprehensive account of English legal thought in the age of Blackstone and Bentham for nearly a century, The Province of Legislation Determined advances an ambitious reinterpretation of eighteenth-...

One of my favorite overall books about Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England:

Blackstone’s synthesis of the common law was debated in his own time. But I think volume 4 is his most important. In it he was the most thoughtful in his critique of England’s laws, especially their “bloody code” which prescribed the death penalty for so many crimes (160), even minor ones.

He continues:“The guilt of blood, if any, must lie at their doors, who misinterpret the extent of their warrant; and not at the doors of the subject, who is bound to receive the interpretations, that are given by the sovereign power.” Blackstone 4:11

Vol 4, page 11, from Blackstone’s section on crime and punishment.
His point is: who are we as judges, and on what authority do we act to take peoples’ lives without strong evidence it is justified? Hegseth and POTUS have acted as judges without such evidence, and only assert their authority.