HMRC put the latest tobacco tax gap estimates out on Tuesday. As with the previous few years, they defy both belief and mathematics. Only 14% of tobacco is illicit, they claim, and illicit…

In the US at least, as far as I can tell, Jean Hyppolite is largely unknown outside of specialists in 20c French thought and Hegel.  Hyppolite is best-known here for his influential Genesis and…

Five prime ministers in a decade, a party with no reverence for its leaders, and a country exhausted by the promise of change. Andy Burnham might inherit all of it.

Here’s a story that’s both totally absurd and a lesson on how not to think about risk. In the early nineties, the US Environmental Protection Agency got into a fight with a company over a toxic waste…

A veces saltarse el muro es un acto político, A veces es mal diseño. En otras palabras, Obediencia a una regla no declarada

How the New York Times changed its coverage of trans people from The Dissident. Spoiler alert: it's not great. I mean - the article/research is excellent. The outcome isn't.

When the numerous officials in the current administration are put on trial (and, one hopes, convicted and subjected to draconian punishments), their pre-trial fears ought to include that the jury…

Kasia Ozga, Spiderwebs, 2018. I was watching fedgeoday 2026 when a speaker from one of my favorite and trusted data source in the US, the “US Census Bureau”, introduced a change in their data…

The term “fedposting,” arose on 4chan’s /pol/ in the late 2010’s. Used to describe anonymous figures advocating violent illegal action, fedposting was an accusation that the original poster was a…

"you really shouldn't care so much what others think of you" is a beautiful name for a baby girl. a perfect closed loop system. if Khrushchev and Kennedy blocked each other on instagram during the…

The cruelty is the point.

I still owe you another genealogy deep-dive, but it's going to have to wait (again) because there has been a development (of sorts). We all know that Bill can't run for mayor this time around - not…

The ‘tokenpocalypse’ isn’t about scary AI bills so much as it is about the absence of sensible AI governance.

My interview on the Al Jazeera program, Inside Story, on Israel’s evolving arms sector (and the carnage that it causes). The post Al Jazeera English The Inside Story on Israeli arms industry…

Capital won't save you from disempowerment.

Disclosures 🧠 This post is fully human-written: all prose with the exception of the IoC information. Because it was time-sensitive, Claude was used to accelerate the RAT analysis and build an…

That may be true for the frontier labs. If you are OpenAI, Anthropic, Google or Meta, perhaps the only game in town is to keep scaling. More GPUs, more data, more power, more infrastructure. The…

So hot in Europe! June wildfires on Greenland. Antarctica above freezing even in the dark of winter. Hear new science of why and what next. Maybe the Gulf Stream/AMOC doesn’t stop. What does that…

Plaintiff NetChoice, a trade association whose members operate many of the largest social media platforms, sued defendant Yost in his capacity as Ohio’s Attorney General. It challenged…

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Councils across Melbourne have united to get the State Government to add bus services and improve networks. This comes in the form of a resolution from the Municipal Association of Victoria passed by…

Arizona Governor Katie Hobbs has vetoed a bill which would have ended the state&#8217;s compliance with the Federal REAL-ID Act. Like many other states, Arizona gives applicants for driver&#8217;s…

Charlie Haden: Books, Pt. 16Charlie Haden: Books, Pt. 16. Charlie&rsquo;s early days at Westlake School of Music; plus the Spanish Civil War, Victor Jara, Sandinistas, and more.

The greatest power is invisibility

ON THIS DAY &#8211; June 24 This day is actually one of the more awful days in the history of the Supreme Court,&#8230;

For most of human history, money was something tangible. You could hold it in your hand, hide it in your home, carry it across a border, lend it to a friend, or spend it without creating a permanent…

For anyone who still wants to pretend that the grouse shooting industry isn’t responsible for the systematic extermination of Hen Harriers on grouse moors across the UK, here’s the latest catalogue…

THANK YOU NEW YORK VOTERS FOR SEEING THROUGH THE GASLIGHTING “VOTING YOUR CONSCIENCE IS UNREALISTIC” SAYS THE DEMOCRAT WHO JUST LOST “THE WORD SOCIALISM SCARES THE AMERICAN WORKING CLASS” SAYS THE…

Last year, one guy made an observation about some Americans' descent into a tribal, impulsive mindset that steamrolls over civility and reason. I think he's on to something.

This is really a posting about sea level rise. However, to segue into it I will open with some recent news from Trump&#8217;s war on renewable energy. To be specific, this news as reported by various…

There is a strand of thought out there that believes any and all legislation to do with seeds is evil and unnecesary. It is wrong. Here’s why. This is not the sunflower we were looking for This…

In his response to Casey Spinks, John Fea objects to a “textualist” approach to the Declaration of Independence. Fea wants something “more nuanced: an approach that takes the document’s original…

Cabinet government is beautifully malleable. How do individuals bend it to their will?

It is just over a month since the last round of state assembly elections ended, but we are already back in election mode. The two-and-a-half years left before the next round of general elections are…

Not my Congressional district but it’s really good to see him landing a new job tonight. [Quoted post]

The trillionaires built AGI and told it: &#8220;Solve the world&#8217;s problems.&#8221; It thought for 0.413 seconds and said: &#8220;Step one &#8211; remove all trillionaires and most…

**Regularly UPDATED**   Reflecting on the Russo-Ukraine War, I am putting together a timeline of the most relevant…

My monthly column for the UK outlet, Middle East Eye: Naftali Bennett, the former Israeli prime minister and aspirant for the top job in this year’s election, was upset. He slammed Benjamin Netanyahu…

Structuring International Governance Through the Space of Concerns

في آخر زياراتي لحلب في أواخر ٢٠١٠، كان الربيع العربي في تونس ومصر على أوجه. اجتمع المصريون في ميدان التحرير في القاهرة مطالبين بإسقاط النظام. كنت يومئذ في حلب، عند الحلاق، منتظرا دوري ونشاهد الأخبار…

Caveat lector This post discusses tools reluctantly written with AI assistance. If you don&rsquo;t entertain using them under any circumstance, and think even reading about them legally compromise…

I started a company in Germany in late January. By late June I had spent 9,600 euros, registered two companies, and still cannot issue a single invoice of my own. Here is the timeline, with the bill…

We’ve been covering the story of how a single phone call between two drama queen grown men - Josh Johnson and Officer Tonga of the American Fork Police Department - somehow escalated into a worldwide…

Kant writes: only three [forms of sovereignty] are possible: namely, either only one , or some in association, or all those together who constitute the civil society possess sovereign power (…

I always meant to have some major epic planned for today&rsquo;s post, but alas. What I have instead are some shorter, compartmentalised thoughts on the whole debacle. Why Brexit? There&rsquo;s a…

White Supremacy Is Monetized in America. The Receipts Are Overwhelming.A woman walks into a public store, tells two Muslim customers they are not welcome in &#x201C;a Christian country,&#x201D; gets…

I wrote about J.D. Vance&apos;s new book for The Nation. Anyone who knows me knows I dislike politicians magically transforming into good ol&apos; boys when it&apos;s politically advantageous.…

When Elon Musk calls to imprison the government, it turns out not to matter very much. But when thousands of accounts repeat each other, it matters enormously.

Patrick Boyle on the repercussions of the U.S. government’s shutdown of Anthropic’ flagship AI models on June 12: For years, the theory was that building artificial intelligence required Silicon…