William Cullerne Bown

Since people internalise the law and Trump is trying to alter its basic character, everyone in the US is experiencing cognitive dissonance. Sometimes, as here and after the murders in MN, it breaks into the open. The Q is, do people react by i) internalising Trumplaw; or ii) repudiating Trumplaw?

Nice *

"A lot of media organisations will be reluctant to air Trump accusations - partly because they’re pretty unverifiable, partly because he's highly litigious."

Why aren't more people talking about the 38,000 mentions of Trump in the Epstein files?

I can’t say I recommend reading the QTs on this exactly but they are certainly a mood

Cockroaches often get into sleeping ears. One guy went to his doctor with roaches in both ears. The doctor wrote it up comparing olive oil and tweezer extraction methods. Olive oil wins.

This happened to me as a three year old. My life flashed in front of my eyes.

We definitely ate struggling for these sorts of basic concepts.

Economic sovereignty and Europe's nation states To resist national populism, nations must rebuild their economic capacity.

Latest on the scope for national economic sovereignty

With the rise of 'Christian Nationalism' there could not be a better time to discuss Faith and England's Identities: With Prof Linda Woodhead, Ibrahim Mogra, George Wilkes, Deesha Chandha Wed 4th February 5:30. Online
www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/faith-and-...

This echoes longstanding findings in medicine that if deployed uncarefully AI can make outcomes worse.

How AI Impacts Skill Formation Judy Hanwen Shen∗ Alex Tamkin† February 3, 2026 Abstract AI assistance produces significant productivity gains across professional domains, particularly for novice workers. Yet how this assistance affects the development of skills required to effectively supervise AI remains unclear. Novice workers who rely heavily on AI to complete unfamiliar tasks may compromise their own skill acquisition in the process. We conduct randomized experiments to study how developers gained mastery of a new asynchronous programming library with and without the assistance of AI. We find that AI use impairs conceptual understanding, code reading, and debugging abilities, without delivering significant efficiency gains on average. Participants who fully delegated coding tasks showed some productivity improvements, but at the cost of learning the library. We identify six distinct AI interaction patterns, three of which involve cognitive engagement and preserve learning outcomes even when participants receive AI assistance. Our findings suggest that AI-enhanced productivity is not a shortcut to competence and AI assistance should be carefully adopted into workflows to preserve skill formation – particularly in safety-critical domains.

Interesting paper, especially interesting it's coming from researchers at Anthropic arxiv.org/pdf/2601.20245

The idea that the US can buy Greenland, for example by making welfare promises, fails because it will always be worth more to Canada. Coercion is the only way Washington can ever get it.

Good luck with the UBI in that scenario. Every capitalist I know will simply migrate their operations and tax revenues to the cheapest location on the planet.

Fabulous!

We have tried her on others but she always preferred the big W. Now I think it may have to be biscuits.

They have changed the packaging of Whiskas pouches. No mention of a new recipe but Twistle won’t eat it any more. Just skims off some of the jelly and walks away. So we end up with bowls and bowls of uneaten food.

Yes.

The science superpower stuff, and the generally generous funding for science by Britain’s neoliberals, is I think best understood as a way to keep this obvious logic at bay. Same as NIH was used to keep at bay demands for an NHS in the US.

There isn’t any way for science per se to reliably make itself useful. It’s usefulness depends on it being needed for something. So it has to be embedded in an industrial or social strategy. So moving money between different science pots makes little difference.

Palantir has your NHS data.

Alistair Darling and the official Treasury were always aware that investment banks had an inside track to Number 10. But the brazen nature of that inside track is rather breath-taking.

This is 90 per cent of what companies are buying from “political consultants”.

read online that someone set-up a premium rate phone number where callers get charged $3.99/ min. then they posted flyers in their neighborhood that said "call this number to report illegal aliens," but the number just puts them on hold with music. so far, they've made $17,000

Harry Corbett with an early version of Grok.

"What's that you say, Grok? It's a fair point? My focus on innovation over distractions is legendary?"

Americans have drawn a red line in Minnesota The Trump administration’s partial retreat will not mend the damage to trust and lives

It's only a matter of time before Trump sues the FT.

It is the fastest growing and most lucrative industry on the planet and its pervasive usefulness makes it a strategic necessity, like oil.

In the absence of effective anti-monopoly measures, industrial strategy is all the more necessary. I also think you have to contemplate what our economic, industrial and security future looks like if we don't develop a domestic tech industry.

I absolutely think export orientation is a good thing. Competition breeds competitiveness.

We have lots of strengths and capacities. For example, we are starting to make certain kinds of semiconductors that we're good at. But Big Tech are monopolies and they are killers.

Sobering Lords report here: publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld5901/ld...

The video calling thing falls into the category of import substitution. It’s a routine and very well established way of developing domestic industry. Big Tech is deeply monopolistic and frankly without intervention the UK, like France, will continue to have no meaningful tech industry.