Fodder #47

What's Trending? What's Transcendent?

We’re in Bar Harbor, Maine this week and headed down to Rhode Island and Pennsylvania before heading back to our normal haunts.

While we were here, Trump dropped some bombs. And the bomb strategy seems suspiciously like Jedi hitting the Death Star — targeted strikes on ventilation shafts. Some people are very upset about the bombs dropping on Iran’s nuclear weaponenergy program.. Some are debating if the bombs worked. Probably they did. The Pentagon affirms MOPs work as designed. Khameini starts tweeting again and congratulates himself on victory. Trump declares a ceasefire and then gets mad when the children keep making fisticuffs. He probably had to press the Diet Coke button. SECDEF doesn’t answer questions and retaliates.

Back home, a bonafide communist wins the Democratic NYC mayoral battle. Government-run grocery stores, price fixing, and rent freezes are back in play, and so is the Intifada, because we all need to learn history’s lessons again. Soon, San Francisco may not be the nation’s progressive playground. Mike Lee wants to sell you a bridge in Wyoming, among other federal land.

Cluely raises money and becomes the latest AI hype toy, and their demo is bananas, but they actually have revenue. Anthropic wins a fair use copyright suit on books. Robotaxi launches in Austin, Texas and rides are $4.20, of course. AI companionship stories hit mainstream media but Anthropic has had a whole report on companionship. Computers build new synthetic enzymes. FHA deems Bitcoin an asset for mortgage applications.

Now on to the reading!

Timely

• Zohran Mamdani’s Luxury Beliefs - Rob Henderson uses his luxury belief framework to deconstruct the newest celebrity of the Left.

• The Three Laws of Staying Human Online - Tom White has produced some great axioms for keeping our humanity while being online, using Asimov’s three laws of robotics as a start.

• Taiwan Is Of Course A Country - The world is focused on Iran but Taiwan’s President kicked off ten talks to unite Taiwan and China of course responds.

• Trump, Mamdani, and Cluely - Kyla Scanlon puts together three of this week’s biggest stories — geopolitical, local NYC, and Silicon Valley venture — and explains how they are all manifestations of the same attention mechanism. Power flows from attention and narrative directly.

Timeless

• Innovation and Repetition - The Cluny Journal re-publishes a classic essay from Rene Girard, breaking down the correlation between the two with references from Shakespeare to all sorts of history.

• China's Military Buildup Threatens Indo-Pacific Region Security - INDOPACOM’s 2025 reminder of the dangers of China in the Pacific theatre and that “China is outproducing the United States in air, maritime and missile capability while also accelerating its space and counter-space capabilities”.

• Prompting Is Managing - This is the new process paradigm: “delegate → monitor → integrate → ship”.

• The Cloister and the Starship - Niall Ferguson breaks down the fundamental skills and needs a university should be teaching, how these change and stay the same in the future, and how the university is failing now. Reminiscent of the Cathedral and the Bazaar.

Books

• Fully Automated Luxury Communism by Aaron Bastani - There’s this futurist idea of post-scarcity societies, wherein we need to figure out how everything works in society when all of Maslow’s hierarchy is taken care of. This book is like that but with Marx as a base. A modern reminder for everyone that “real Communism has never been tried".. but thought-provoking nonetheless.

Tweets

Some good ones, so you don’t need to scroll

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The world is amazing. Cheers!