A rose by any name…
… is still ravishing.
Just noticed these as I was sitting at the table, with my favourite picture (HCB’s Rue Mouffetard) in the background.
Quote of the Day
” We don’t love qualities, we love persons; sometimes by reason of their defects as well as of their qualities.
- Thomas Mann
Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news
Keith Jarrett | Over the Rainbow (Tokyo 1984)
Long Read of the Day
America’s AI Policy Is Truly Chaotic
A nice commentary by Francis Fukuyama on what the chaos monkeys in the White House are up to with AI.
This year has been a crazy time with regard to Washington’s treatment of artificial intelligence, and the pace has picked up in the last couple of weeks. This train of events began in February when Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth declared the leading AI firm Anthropic, a “supply chain risk,” meaning that neither the Pentagon nor its contractors could use Anthropic models without risking legal liability.
Then, in April, Anthropic announced that its latest Mythos model was so powerful that it would be released to only a handful of organizations. Mythos, it was claimed, had extraordinary abilities to break into computer systems, and these early organizations were asked to use it to test and secure their systems. In June, Senator Mark Warner told the Senate Banking Committee, “thank God it was Anthropic. When the head of the NSA and Cyber Command came and said, ‘This tool broke into almost all of our classified systems, not in weeks, but in hours,’ … we are not going to solve this problem if we rely on a less ethical CEO operating on the basis of plain voluntary testing alone.”
Experts later added caveats to this description of Mythos 5’s capabilities, but it is clear that the politics of AI regulation has shifted dramatically in the past month. The Trump administration came into office last year being advised by tech bros like David Sacks and Marc Andreessen, who opposed any form of AI regulation. The latter in fact created an organization called Leading the Future that put significant money behind lobbying against AI regulation. The Trump White House nonetheless intervened against Anthropic, but only for what looked like typically bad political reasons. The company, according to Hegseth, was too “woke”; otherwise, the administration’s default position was to oppose all regulation.
Read on. Even the monkeys understand a national security problem. Or do they?
Books, etc.
I read this biography when it first came out in 1995, but was reminded it at our annual Bloomsday lunch on June 16, when we were talking about Ulysses. It came up because in 1922 the literary critic F.R Leavis (who was then a junior lecturer in Cambridge) had referred to Joyce’s masterpiece in his lecture course on “Modern Problems in Criticism”). Ulysses had been banned in Britain since December 1922, when a copy was seized at Croydon Aerodome. Later on, Leavis astutely stirred the pot by asking his bookseller, Galloway & Porter (of blessed memory), to write to the Chief Constable of Cambridge asking if a copy of Ulysses could be supplied. In the book, Leavis’s biographer provides an hilarious narrative of the ensuing farce, which is straight out of Gilbert & Sullivan, but without the music.
The Home Office was disgusted at the prospect of “boy and girl undergraduates” reading Ulysses, the work of “a dangerous crank”. Active steps would be taken to prevent the lectures taking place. Another comedy character, the Director of Public Prosecution, was then brought in. At his behest the Chief Constable discovered that Leavis did not hold the post of University lecturer, though he did give lectures for the English Faculty, and that “he also takes pupils privately”. Worse still, he was also planning a course on criticism to be attended by both men and women!
Behind these scenes was the new Home Secretary, William Johnson-Hicks (nicknamed ‘Jix’ by some wags), who among other things was an evangelical president of the National Church League and, accordingly, someone whose sense of humour had presumably been surgically removed at birth.
The Director of Public Prosecutions wrote to the university’s Vice-Chancellor saying that “the contemplated inclusion of this book in the Leavis lectures must be avoided”. He confessed himself unable to “make head or tail” of Joyce’s novel but was nevertheless able to discern that its closing pages (Molly Bloom’s famous soliloquy) were obviously gross and indecent since they constituted the “reminiscences of an Irish chamber-maid”.
Which perhaps explains why I have embarked on a second reading of this fine biography.
My commonplace booklet
There’s the Constitution, and then there’s the actual constitution
From McSweeney’s Internet Tendency
For example, the ordinary Constitution may seem to say that birthright citizenship exists because it uses words arranged in that order. But the higher Constitution—the enlightened one visible only to people who have freed themselves from the tyranny of thought-out and legally pressure-tested sentences—reveals a more nuanced principle: Citizenship shall apply automatically at birth unless someone loud and male on any number of primetime cable news shows feels skin color makes them uncomfortable.
This is not hypocrisy. Hypocrisy requires a fixed standard. Please keep up. We have moved beyond that. This, too, is the genius of conservative legal reasoning: It can stand athwart history yelling breathlessly about original meaning, then sprint blindly toward the nearest convenient exception.
Naturally, the left keeps making the same tedious mistake. They point to text. They grunt their little grunts about precedent. Then they act wounded when five or six conservative justices consult the super-secret invisible Constitution and discover that the real meaning was hidden inside a special project that culminated only recently, in 2025. Please do not confuse this reading as lawlessness. It is advanced reading. So advanced, in fact, that it no longer requires reading.
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