Eli Kohlenberg

Imagine if Joe Biden threatened attacking Greenland and then in front of a world audience confused Greenland and Iceland.

Mental competence questions would rage.

Mafia goon: Nice house you got here...it'd be a shame if something happened to it

Media outlets: Mafia goon rules out use of force. Expresses regret at the mere thought of it

Trump Butchers the Golden Goose He’s convinced he has to kill liberalism and democracy to realize their benefits.

"The moral of the fable about the goose that laid the golden egg is straightforward, but it never really worked for me as a story. Like, come on: Nobody’s that stupid. Well, *almost* nobody, I guess."

Today's Morning Shots from @billkristolbulwark.bsky.social and @eggerdc.bsky.social:

Opinion | Europe Has a Bazooka. Time to Use It.

Very good piece about what Europe can and should do about Trump's Greenland threats by @himself.bsky.social.

But will they? Or will national divisions, denial, and risk aversion get in the way?

Essentially, Europe could use more Tom Schelling Thought.

Gift link, for anyone without a subscription:

Corcoran is a former politician. More specifically, he was the Speaker of the Florida House. He has spent his 35 year career working in Republican politics. Because of term limits, Corcoran needed a job in 2018. Ron DeSantis appointed him to be Education Commissioner. After a failed bid to become the President of Florida State University in 2021, he briefly worked as a lobbyist until a Ron DeSantis-appointed committee fired the previous head of New College and appointed Corcoran. Corcoran got a pay package four times lartger than his predecessor, worth about 1.2 million dollars, despite lacking basic qualifications for the job. After he was appointed, Corcoran published a book praising DeSantis: Standing His Ground: The Inside Story of Ron DeSantis’s Rise and Battle for Freedom. With a foreword by Ron DeSantis! What a get!

The Times interviews and quotes the university president, who says things like the old New College “was ‘a little Club Med' for people who were all ideologically the same." He is only identified as a former state education commissioner. This leaves out a lot. donmoynihan.substack.com/p/the-nyt-re...

That’s actually a typo, it’s meant to say “Anthropophagy for food and nutrition”

They’re not using the cross as a symbol of Christmas, they’re using it as a symbol of Christian identity

“By now you know I have taken the ’short route’ home.”

(Though I suppose there is the truly bespoke conspiracy theory that he was murdered days after writing a letter indicating he planned to kill himself, but before he got around to it.)

It certainly could have been sent before his death, in which case it is certainly real, because it directly references his intent to kill himself.

But you said in another post he didn’t kill himself—I personally think he did, but if he didn’t, he clearly could not have written the letter.

It‘s postmarked three days after his death. There’s no evidence it was written before his death.

“Handwriting analysis” to determine personality traits is completely pseudoscientific. “Handwriting analysis” to determine whether the same person wrote two documents is, while not 100% reliable, an absolutely legitimate forensic tool.

I take brassica very seriously

From Culinary Dud To Stud: How Dutch Plant Breeders Built Our Brussels Sprouts Boom Brussels sprouts used to be scorned. Now they're trendy. And one reason for their renaissance sits tucked away in a basement storage room in the Netherlands.

If you are older than 39 then the Brussels sprouts themselves are objectively better now than when you were a kid, because scientists and farmers have made them less bitter

www.npr.org/sections/the...

I actually learned about that recently while reading about the song ”I’m My Own Grandpa”, because the situation it describes very nearly happened when Wyman’s son married Mandy’s mother, only by that time they were already divorced.

Bill Wyman of the Stones

Far Side cartoon depicts several vultures facing each other in a circle on the ground in a desert. One of them is wearing a big cowboy hat and a jacket and has his beak open in speech. The caption says “Hey! Look at me, everybody! I’m a cowboy! … Howdy, howdy, howdy!”

Reminds me of our old family favorite

This appears to show that the last ~three years have been the only time in decades that unemployment has risen steadily outside of a major contraction, and maybe even the longest sustained period of growing unemployment, period.

Not sure what that means but seems notable.

If that prevented everyone from drinking the interlock devices would have no additional benefit. I am not an expert but I doubt it does or we wouldn’t be having this conversation.

Drinking isn’t free either! For most people what they consequently didn’t spend on alcohol would offset at least some of the cost of the device, and for some it might be a net savings.

See also: going to sleep and waking up.

The ”good news”, assuming we don’t want to create sentient AI is that it would be quite easy to avoid those conditions.

The bad news is that many fruitful avenues for making AI more powerful and useful might (and to some extent already do) involve meeting both.

I agree that sentience probably relies on interaction with an environment, and (being somewhat of a Hofstadterian) likely some capacity for self-observation. But I think stateful, agentic software has plenty of potential to meet both those conditions.

That’s a different kind of “alive”, than consciousness, though (and one Descartes I imagine would have granted squirrels). I agree that a software program cannot be alive in that sense, but I don’t see that as a precondition for sentience (or moral consideration).

What makes it possible for something that “runs on“ biochemistry to be “alive“, but impossible for something that “runs on“ code to be “alive”?

(Not that I think chatbots are, but being software is not a sufficient condition for me to be certain they are not.)

And the 14th

But how could SCOTUS logically grandfather it? If the Constitution doesn’t grant birthright citizenship today then it didn’t in the past either. It would be pure legislating from the bench

I watched Starship Troopers with two friends a while ago, and during the post-film discussion one of them took the position that it was earnest and not a satire, but also that it had a point and maybe citizenship should be contingent on military service.

As a YIMBY pescatarian I was all about 3. Nailed it.

The whole thrust of a lot of that fiction is that even if AI is apparently sentient many or most people will choose to believe it is not.

Nobody *wants* to be Bruce Maddox.

Opinion | The Data on Self-Driving Cars Is Clear. We Have to Change Course.

www.nytimes.com/2025/12/02/o...

This will make me massively unpopular here, but it makes total sense that automated cars are safer than human drivers and we should welcome them.