THE LAW OF UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES ALWAYS HAS THE LAST LAUGH:

REAGAN WAS RIGHT ON STAR WARS: More than 1,500 Iranian ballistic missiles have been intercepted before striking U.S. military targets and other targets in Israel and elsewhere in the Middle East.

The President who first proposed the  Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) nee “Star Wars” in 1983 was lambasted for proposing the impossible. Too bad those critics aren’t around today to see Reagan’s vision being fulfilled.

VOTE AS THOUGH YOUR LIFE, LIBERTY, AND PROPERTY DEPEND UPON IT*:

*Because they do.

ASKING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: Do COVID And AI Rhyme?

Think about that for a moment.

Some of the people leading the race are now asking government to help slow the race.

Business titans generally don’t beg Washington to regulate their industries. When they do, it is reasonable to ask why.

Perhaps these executives genuinely fear what they are creating. Given the extraordinary capabilities of AI, that possibility should not be dismissed.

But there is another possibility.

Regulation is expensive. Giant corporations can afford armies of lawyers, compliance officers, lobbyists, engineers, and safety researchers. Smaller competitors and startups often cannot. What begins as a regulatory guardrail can eventually become a competitive moat.

Investor Steve Eisman, famous for anticipating the 2008 housing collapse, recently made precisely this argument, suggesting that AI companies warning of catastrophe may benefit from regulations that protect dominant firms from competitors.

That doesn’t prove motive, but it certainly makes the question worth asking.

And the political cavalry was arriving at roughly the same time.

Read the whole thing.

BUT GOOD LUCK NEUTERING THE TRIAL LAWYER LOBBY:

FLASHBACK: The Banality of Leninism. “Historians often act like Lenin’s tyranny was a bolt from the blue: Who would have expected a bunch of socialists to be so bloodthirsty? Admirers of Lenin, in contrast, often paint him as a great innovator – at least as a strategist. A dictatorship of the proletariat run by a vanguard party of bourgeois intellectuals? Only Lenin could have conceived it. When you read 19th-century Russian literature, however, “Leninist” memes clearly predate the birth of Lenin. Contrary to many historians, Lenin’s atrocities were foreseeable. And contrary to Lenin’s admirers, his strategy of atrocity was pure cliche.”

This piece is from 2012 but is as timely as ever.

ANALYSIS: TRUE. Effective Altruism is evil. “These people are impossible to parody. I wish I could convey to you how absurd this is, but any straightforward description of it makes one sound insane.”

HMM: America Needs a New Urban Vision.

Cities historically grew and prospered because of their location by rivers, ports, or natural resources. They might also have been the capitals of great empires or religious centers, or boasted vital institutions like universities, museums, and industry clusters—legacies of great economic booms.

The age of modern media has seen the emergence of a new key element catalyzing growth in contemporary societies: a compelling urban vision. Urban visions formulate attractive paradigms of what a successful city looks like, focusing on four central ingredients: people, businesses, leaders, and capital.

American cities largely lack such a unifying idea today.

Interesting article, but I remain wary of people who have visions of how other people should live.

Why not try good governance and letting people figure it out for themselves?

THE NEW SPACE RACE:

More: “Sedaro is a mission simulation software platform designed for National Security that can model satellites, sensors, communications networks, and other military systems together. This will allow the Space Force to digitally rehearse entire missions, simulate hostile attacks, and expose weak points before putting hardware or personnel at risk.”

IN THE GRAND OLD TRADITION OF STALIN ORDERING TROTSKY MURDERED IN MEXICO: Russia Allegedly Went Shopping for a Hitman in America. The Price Was $40,000. “An indictment unsealed in Manhattan charges five people with working in a network tied to Russian intelligence services. Prosecutors say the network recruited people in America to surveil Russian dissidents and, in at least one case, tried to recruit someone to carry out a killing here. All five defendants remain at large.”

THIS IS A REAL PROBLEM FOR NOT JUST BRITAIN, BUT PRETTY MUCH ALL OF WESTERN EUROPE:

THE COLLAPSE OF THE EUROPEAN CENTER CONTINUES APACE: Merz’s CDU suffers total wipeout in state election.

The chancellor’s centre-Right party won 4.9 per cent of the vote in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, final results confirmed on Monday.

The hard-Right populist Alternative for Germany (AfD) took 38.2 per cent of the vote, while the hard-Left Die Linke beat the CDU in mayoral elections in Berlin. Mr Merz is scheduled to address the public on Monday afternoon.

The astonishingly poor result meant that, for the first time, the CDU failed to win enough votes to enter a state parliament in Germany.

Under the country’s voting system, parties that fall below the 5 per cent threshold are not assigned any seats in the next parliament.

Such a scenario was virtually unthinkable for the CDU – the German version of the Conservatives and a mainstay of coalition governments for decades – until Sunday night.

Related:

Middle eastern criminal clans have partnered with the socialist parties of Northern Europe to keep the borders open, accelerate citizenships to grow the foreign voter base and take over power.

The socialists agree to give up pork, feminism and LGBTQ and in return get more voters and street muscle. Both sides agree on rapid expatriation and wealth transfer from the natives to the newcomers as well as the elimination of Christian resistance.

The natives are holding still because they are scared to be called racist.

The only problem are the East Germans who for some reason don’t like it and vote AfD.

The new German left is anti-liberal (in the old-school sense) and backed up by “street muscle.”

Pretty sure we’ve seen this movie before.

“WE’LL SEE,” INDEED: