I have always had a very low opinion of Bill Clinton, and over the years that opinion has only gotten lower. Very much lower. The above notwithstanding, Clinton was clearly a highly intelligent individual and politician. He also had the ability and confidence to surround himself with intelligent and capable officials. Among these, arguably the most intelligent and decent of the lot was @RBReich , Clinton’s Secretary of Labor during his first term. In the article below he brilliantly dissects the “magic trick, out of thin air … built on self-dealing” that is the SpaceX IPO. theguardian.com/commentisfre…

The Chinese socialist project from Mao to Xi: one continuous revolution. The standard Western story about modern China is that Mao has been quietly buried by the Communist Party, that Deng Xiaoping repudiated his legacy, and that the China that emerged after 1978 is no longer really socialist. By implication, China’s success is the success of capitalism, not of the revolution. So why do ordinary Chinese people still travel in their millions to Shaoshan – the village in Hunan where Mao was born, now one of the most-visited tourist sites in China – to pay their respects to the founder of the People’s Republic? Stand there among the crowds and the Western story falls apart on contact. In this video I draw on a recent trip to Shaoshan, and on the hard development data from the Mao era, to answer that question: the Mao era and the reform era are not opposed phases of Chinese history. They are two stages of a single revolutionary project, and the Chinese people know it. Between 1949 and 1976, life expectancy in China rose by 32 years – the fastest improvement ever recorded by any country in human history. Adult illiteracy fell from over 80 per cent to 33 per cent by 1978. Land was redistributed. Women were emancipated. A complete industrial base was built from near-zero. The treaty ports were abolished. The country was unified after a century of fragmentation. This is the China the post-Mao leadership inherited – not the impoverished backwater of Western myth. Without Mao, no Deng. Without 1949, no 1978. As the late Egyptian Marxist Samir Amin put it, the take-off of the post-1978 period “would not have been possible without the economic, political and social foundations that had been built up in the preceding period.” It is also exactly how the Communist Party of China understands its own history, in Xi Jinping’s doctrine of “the two cannot negates.” youtube.com/watch?v=4LuBmu87…

This is why every country should build their own AI. The US government just switched off the world's most powerful public AI with one letter. No court. No explanation. They don't answer to your business, your country, or you. Access to American AI can be revoked overnight, by people you don't elect, for reasons they never have to explain. Depending on it is now a strategic risk, not a convenience. China saw this coming. Chinese providers went from under 2% of global AI model traffic to over 45% in a single year. The names driving it: Kimi from Moonshot, Qwen from Alibaba, DeepSeek, MiniMax, StepFun, Tencent, and ByteDance. The chips are the part people underestimate. GLM-5 was trained entirely on Huawei Ascend silicon. DeepSeek's latest runs on domestic chips. Baidu brought a 30,000-chip cluster online with no Nvidia inside. Nvidia's China market share fell from 85% to 70% in a single year. China's chips still trail the frontier, and it still buys Nvidia where it can. But it is building faster than any export control can contain. Every lab diversifying, every domestic chip shipped, every model trained on Huawei silicon is a step toward a stack no foreign letter can touch. China didn't wait to be told. It decided years ago it would never be switched off, and it started building. Every country watching this needs to make that same decision. If you want to track where AI is actually heading, follow me.

I have always had a very low opinion of Bill Clinton, and over the years that opinion has only gotten lower. Very much lower. The above notwithstanding, Clinton was clearly a highly intelligent individual and politician. He also had the ability and confidence to surround himself with intelligent and capable officials. Among these, arguably the most intelligent and decent of the lot was @RBReich , Clinton’s Secretary of Labor during his first term. In the article below he brilliantly dissects the “magic trick, out of thin air … built on self-dealing” that is the SpaceX IPO. theguardian.com/commentisfre…

Dozens of American citizens, meantime, remain barred from leaving China, often because of a link to a legal dispute. The U.S. Embassy in Beijing has sought, with varying degrees of success, to free these Americans from their effective confinement. wsj.com/world/china/china-ar…

How can we tackle misconceptions about nicotine? It starts with how we think about policy. On The @SmokelessWord: Live from the Lab, Dr James Murphy and Joe Gitchell explore the role of policy in reducing smoking prevalence and misconceptions about nicotine. Watch now.

Today, the European Union took a major step forward. All Member States agreed to open the first accession negotiations cluster with Ukraine and Moldova. At the first Intergovernmental Conference on Monday, we will open the cluster on fundamentals; the backbone of the accession process. It covers the core values and principles on which the EU is built, from the rule of law to strong democratic institutions. This is a recognition of the determination, courage and hard work shown by both countries in advancing reforms, even in the face of immense challenges. And a signal that the EU’s offer of peace, stability and opportunity is unmatchable. Enlargement is a strategic choice. By bringing our nations closer together, we strengthen peace, security and prosperity across our continent. In a world marked by growing uncertainty, a larger European Union is in our common interest. Enlargement remains one of the EU’s greatest success stories and our best investment in our shared future.

Patriotic Filipinos just stormed the Chinese Embassy in Makati on the occasion of Philippine Independence Day. Protesters burned China’s ridiculous 10-dash line map and exposed China's harassment of their fishermen. Filipinos are fed up with Chinese aggression!

This is normal. Don't use it for anything important.

For anyone wondering what this means: - Anthropic (and potentially future OpenAI, Google, xAI) models that cost billions to develop will make 0 revenue outside the US - a big double digit percentage of Anthropic (and potentially OpenAI, Google, xAI) workforce can no longer work there, because they are foreigners and are not allowed to use those models So Trump just made frontier model development effectively unprofitable and tremendously slowed down Anthropic (and potentially others in the future) He's handing China the win on a gold platter. *potentially: if the same restrictions are imposed on other frontier labs and models

The US government, citing national security authorities, has issued an export control directive to suspend all access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 by any foreign national, whether inside or outside the United States, including foreign national Anthropic employees. The net effect of this order is that we must abruptly disable Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for all our customers to ensure compliance. Access to all other Claude models is not affected. We apologize for this disruption to our customers. We believe this is a misunderstanding and are working to restore access as soon as possible. Read our full statement: anthropic.com/news/fable-myt…

Geopolitical analyst and China expert Melissa Chen on the CCP's weaponization of antisemitism to divide Western society: “China's goal is to subvert the world order. It's a very easy way for them to paint Israel as a Western project.”