Author: Thomas L. Knapp

Source: Astral Codex Ten
by Scott Alexander

“Midjourney is an AI image model. If you’ve ever used Nano Banana or asked GPT to draw you a picture, it’s like that, except from a medium-sized startup instead of a tech giant. Earlier today, they announced a pivot to medical scanners. The new MidJourney Scanner … will be a tank of water surrounded by a ring of ultrasound scanners. The patient goes into the tank, the scanners emit ultrasound from all angles, and then some fancy AI reconstructs the echoes into a 3D picture of the body. The result is ultrasound tomography: the same sort of rich data as a CT or MRI, but done via ultrasound, with no harmful radiation, in twenty seconds. This is cool, and it’s great to be ambitious, but I think the narrative among the SF AI crowd has escaped its basis in the medical facts, so I want to throw a bit of cold water on it.” (06/19/26)

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/preliminary-thoughts-on-the-midjourney

Source: Antiwar.com
by Trita Parsi

“Given the circumstances, President Trump’s decision to strike a deal with Tehran and bring this costly, unnecessary war to an end is the right one. It deserves support, not partisan second-guessing. As Rob Malley – a key member of Barack Obama’s team that negotiated the nuclear deal and later Joe Biden’s lead negotiator with Iran – noted on X, comparing Trump’s memorandum of understanding to Obama’s JCPOA misses the point. What matters is not how the agreement stacks up against past diplomatic achievements, but how it compares to the alternatives before us. And on that score, Malley argued, the MOU is ‘far preferable to any of the alternatives on offer. Period.’ I would go further. To examine the Memorandum of Understanding and ask ‘Was the war worth it?’ is nonsensical. Of course it wasn’t.” (06/19/26)

https://original.antiwar.com/trita-parsi/2026/06/18/trump-the-democrats-and-the-courage-to-end-a-failed-war/

Source: The Realist Review
by Martin Sieff

“It should be cold comfort indeed, but the successive inability of one US administration after another to control Israel and the extraordinary passion with which the leaders of Western Europe, Canada and NATO continue to defy the United States to risk thermonuclear world war with Russia at the whims of Ukrainian junta leader Volodymyr Zelensky are not unprecedented. For the dark, universally unacknowledged world history of the past 120 years is clear: Tails Wag Dogs. Global superpowers and great continent-spanning empires are brought into needless total conflict and utter mutually assured destruction by the machinations, betrayals and petty intrigues of tiny postage stamp states — usually with unacknowledged, disgusting and even genocidal recent political histories.” (06/18/26)

https://therealistreview.substack.com/p/tail-wags-dog

Source: Cobden Centre
by Max Rangeley

“How to safeguard the human person in the time of artificial intelligence? It is hardly a surprise that Pope Leo XIV in answering that question in his first encyclical does not include money as part of the solution. More is the pity. The present unsound money regime has abetted vast malinvestment in the digital revolution now in its AI phase. Malinvestment takes various forms and is driven by mal signalling in capital markets caused by monetary inflation. Alongside the legal and constitutional backbone of the free-market economy falters. The build-up of the surveillance state is one consequence. All of this endangers ‘the human person.'” (06/18/26)

https://www.cobdencentre.org/2026/06/sound-money-artificial-intelligence-and-the-pope/

Source: Liberalism.org
by Sarah Skwire

The other day, I texted my youngest a reminder to take out the trash. In response I received, ‘sit down theodore.’ I was, to say the least, confused. It turns out that ‘sit down theodore’ had evolved as a complicated joke with a friend about the word ‘noted.’ First it became ‘no ted.’ That transformed into ‘stop it, teddy’ then into ‘enough, teddy.’ That morphed into ‘sit teddy’ and finally ‘sit down theodore.’ The joke became so ingrained in their texting conversations that they set the autocorrect feature on their phones to transform the word ‘noted’ into ‘sit down theodore’ whenever they typed it. All of this explained the text I received, but it also got me thinking about one of the most important aspects of a liberal society — spontaneous order.” (06/18/26)

https://www.liberalism.org/p/sit-down-theodore-slang-and-spontaneous-order