Crypt Off

“Putin appeared to be making up facts as he went along. No encirclement around Rubtsi (population: 350 ) has been reported by any reliable source in Russia or Ukraine, and there is no river called Stary Oskol in that region. The Russian president’s obsession with the details of the fighting appears to have crossed the line into delusion.” Simon Shuster in The Atlantic (Gift Article): Putin Is Slipping Into Delusion. “Does that mania for war make him any more likely to cut his losses and accept a negotiated peace? Probably not. His interview on Monday illustrated what many in Ukraine and Europe have long concluded about Putin’s state of mind. He has convinced himself that the attritional math of the war favors Russia, and he will continue to press the numerical advantage of his forces regardless of how long the lines for gasoline in Moscow might get.”

+ Long lines for gas are hardly the only costs being paid for this insane invasion. NYT (Gift Article): Troop Casualties in Ukraine War Top 2 Million. “The study, published on Wednesday by the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, said Russia has borne the heavier toll, with 1.4 million troops killed or wounded since February 2022, when Russia invaded Ukraine.”

+ Here’s the story of one of those deaths. The Prom Went On in Kyiv, but Masha’s Date Danced Alone.

“This is a shocking development that should upend all expectations that this court can be trusted to apply the most basic constitutional guarantees when a Republican president seeks to nullify them. If a theory flatly rejected by all serious legal scholars and historians can come one vote away from success, no rights are safe. Everything is on the table.” The Supreme Court’s 5–4 Vote in the Birthright Citizenship Case Is a Scandal.

+ To really understand how extreme (and extremely nuts) the (slim) minority opinions were in this case, I recommend these two segments from Lawrence O’Donnell’s episode on the case. Here’s Laurence Tribe on the law. And Pulitzer Prize-winning Yale historian David Blight on the history.

“The possibility that artificial intelligence will steal all our jobs has been hyped by industry leaders. It has roused politicians to sound the alarm. It now ranks at or near the top of the public’s concerns about the new technology.” Is it the right thing to be worried about? I’ll have an answer for that question when AI replaces me. Zeynep Tufekci with some interesting takes on the matter in the NYT (Gift Article): The Unstoppable Force of A.I. Hype Is Meeting One Immovable Fact. “Air Canada disabled its chatbots after they mistakenly promised a customer a refund — and the customer sued and won. McDonald’s scuttled the bot taking orders at its drive-throughs after a number of viral videos showed it to be wildly dysfunctional. In one case, the bot mistakenly added hundreds of dollars of chicken nuggets to a customer’s order. These scary — OK, OK, funny — incidents aren’t the result of coding errors. They’re the result of an essential, inescapable fact about the artificial intelligence that has become so common in so many aspects of our daily lives: Large language models are not reasoning machines. They’re plausibility engines.”

250 Ways To Leave Your Govern: “Inevitably, the Trump administration has destroyed the nation’s 250th-anniversary celebrations. I was 11 in 1976, during the bicentennial, and that July 4, I was at a summer camp in North Carolina. I remember celebratory flag-raising and patriotic songs, as well as sparklers in the evening. At the time, we didn’t think there was a permanent cultural divide between red states and blue states. In retrospect, I’m sure some of my fellow campers came from families with views different from mine. It didn’t matter to our celebration of the bicentennial, mostly because we were 11. But it also wouldn’t have mattered even if we were adults, because everyone knew that the bicentennial was for all of us. The tall ships, the fireworks, the Freedom Train that carried a moon rock around the country—all of these were symbols we shared, no matter which part of America we came from. President Gerald Ford didn’t try to make the events of that year about himself or his base, or his tribe, or his bank account. This year is different, because the White House is inhabited by people who don’t believe in the ‘abstractions’ that we usually celebrate on the Fourth of July. And this affects the rest of us, whether we want it to or not.” Anne Applebaum nails it in The Atlantic (Gift Article): Trump’s Anti-Patriotic Trap. (I think the best bet is to focus on the local and enjoy your friends and family this Fourth. I’m going to watch the SF fog light up in different colors the same way I do every year. Hopefully, America’s 252nd-and-a-half birthday is going to be the greatest party in history.)

+ Strike Struck: As the Pentagon stays quiet, AP reconstructs a US strike that killed over 100 Iranian children. “In almost any other conflict, these haunting truths would be seared into national memory. Yet more than 120 days since at least one U.S. missile struck an Iranian primary school, there remains no final accounting of what happened.”

+ Deport to a Storm: “The plane carrying 146 Venezuelans deported from the United States arrived at Venezuela’s main airport last Wednesday — just eight hours before the ground began to violently shake. Venezuelan officials welcomed the deportees — 120 men, 19 women and 7 children — and recorded carefully staged videos celebrating their arrival after spending weeks in U.S. detention centers. Most, if not all, were then ferried away from the cameras to a state-run holding facility, where they settled into bunk beds and were told they would be released the next day, after being processed.” Killed by the Venezuelan Quakes Just Hours After Being Deported From U.S.

+ Unnatural Disaster: “Venezuela’s man-made disasters didn’t take long to exacerbate the natural one. For 28 years and counting, Venezuela’s rulers have stolen or squandered much of the oil revenue of the most oil-rich country in the world. Oligarchs pocketed the petrodollars of the late-aughts oil boom and left the nation somehow poorer and more indebted. In the hours just before the earthquakes struck, the regime released a total figure for the amount that it owed its creditors: $240 billion. The humanitarian consequences of this wastefulness were well documented before last Wednesday. Now they have acquired a fresh urgency.” The Atlantic (Gift Article): The Vultures Arrived Before the Rescue Teams. “The lack of preparation is unforgivable. Worse, the regime led by Delcy Rodríguez—under the heavy-handed management of the Trump administration—has taken active steps to make matters worse. The government deployed the military to the disaster areas not to help but to diffuse any expression of public discontent.”

+ Establishing a Trend: First, it was New York. Now it’s Colorado. Politico: Anti-establishment avalanche buries a pair of Colorado Democratic stalwarts.

+ Anthropics Or It Didn’t Happen: “The Trump administration and Anthropic have reached an agreement to restore access to the company’s most recent general-access artificial-intelligence model, resolving a fight that showed how the White House is intervening to address security concerns in the fast-growing industry.”

+ City on a Mission: “Mission Dolores was founded by Spanish missionaries the same year the U.S. declared its independence. It has borne witness to its own version of the American story—not the one you learned in school but one with much to say about what it means to be American.” Esquire: The San Francisco Church That Holds America’s Secrets.

+ A Tough Cell: “Scientists have long dreamed of discovering the alchemy by which chemicals can be turned into life. On Wednesday, a team at the University of Minnesota announced that it had taken a major step toward that vision. Blending together dozens of ingredients, the researchers have synthesized simple cells that feed, grow, reproduce and compete with one another for food. If these cells are not yet fully alive, they have most of the hallmarks of life.” NYT (Gift Article): This Cell Feeds, Grows and Reproduces. And It’s Manmade. (Call me when it can distill the news…)

Attention Kmart shoppers: “One customer shared photos of a T-rex balloon she purchased for her child, only to discover something unexpected about the item’s design. ‘Bought this balloon for my daughter’s birthday, and there’s something a little off-putting about the blow hole.'” (Hey, even inflatable dinosaurs deserve some pleasure in this life. But if your T-Rextion lasts more than four hours…)