Copernicvs

In the summer of 2000, as the Harry Potter series was quickly becoming a global sensation, legendary Yale critic Harold Bloom gave one of his most unpopular takes, calling 35 million readers wrong

Food for thought. Trump, Hormuz and the End of the Free Ride For half a century, Western strategists have known that the Strait of Hormuz is the acute point where energy, sea power and political will intersect. That knowledge is not in dispute. What is new in this war with Iran is that the United States, under Donald Trump, has chosen not to rush to “solve” the problem. In Hegelian terms, he is refusing an easy synthesis in order to force the underlying contradiction to the surface. The old thesis was simple: the US guarantees open sea lanes in the Gulf, and everyone else structures their economies and politics around that free insurance. Europe and the UK embraced ambitious green policies, ran down hard‑power capabilities and lectured Washington on multilateral virtue, secure in the assumption that American carriers would always appear off Hormuz. The political class behaved as if the American security guarantee were a law of nature, not a contingent choice. Their conduct today is closer to Chamberlain than Churchill: temporising, issuing statements, hoping the storm will pass without a fundamental reordering of their responsibilities. Trump’s antithesis is to withhold the automatic guarantee at the moment of maximum stress. Militarily, the US can break Iran’s residual ability to contest the Strait; that is not the binding constraint. The point is to delay that act. By allowing a closure or semi‑closure to bite, Trump ensures that the immediate pain is concentrated in exactly the jurisdictions that have most conspicuously free‑ridden on US power: the EU and the UK. Their industries, consumers and energy‑transition assumptions are exposed. In that context, his reported blunt message to European and British leaders, you need the oil out of the Strait more than we do; why don’t you go and take it? Is not a throwaway line. It is the verbalisation of the antithesis. It openly reverses the traditional presumption that America will carry the burden while its allies emote from the sidelines. In this dialectic, the prize is not simply the reopening of a chokepoint. The prize is a reordered system in which the United States effectively arbitrages and controls the global flow of oil. A world in which US‑aligned production in the Americas plus a discretionary capability to secure,or not secure, Hormuz places Washington at the centre of the hydrocarbon chessboard. For that strategic end, a rapid restoration of the old status quo would be counterproductive. A quick, surgical “fix” of Hormuz would short‑circuit the dialectic. If Trump rapidly crushed Iran’s remaining coastal capabilities, swept the mines and escorted tankers back through the Strait, Europe and the UK would heave a sigh of relief and return to business as usual: underfunded militaries, maximalist green posturing and performative disdain for US power, all underwritten by that same power. The contradiction between their dependence and their posture would remain latent. By declining to supply the synthesis on demand, and by explicitly telling London and Brussels to “go and take it” themselves, Trump forces a reckoning. European and British leaders must confront the fact that their energy systems, their industrial bases and their geopolitical sermons all rest on an American hard‑power foundation they neither finance nor politically respect. The longer the contradiction is allowed to unfold, the stronger the eventual synthesis can be: a new order in which access to secure flows, Hormuz, Venezuela and beyond, is explicitly conditional on real contributions, not assumed as a right. In that sense, the delay in “taking” the Strait, and the challenge issued to US allies to do it themselves, is not indecision. It is the negative moment Hegel insisted was necessary for history to move. Only by withholding the old guarantee, and by saying so out loud to those who depended on it, can Trump hope to end the free ride.

Jeff Booth, Nick & Jack explain how there is ZERO risk of quantum attack on Bitcoin Few understand.

a long time ago i had the experience of chatting irl with someone well known on twitter, well connected, well platformed, influential, etc. He was smart, seemed to have domain expertise in his technical field. But gradually over the course of the conversation I realized he didn't actually know what he was talking about. He used complicated words, but in subtly off ways, and would reply to questions with things that sounded like answers but actually weren't.He'd confidently reference concepts that I think he assumed I didn't know, but I did know, and I knew that the term he used didn't actually have anything to do with his claim, etc. But his confidence was intense and radiating, and the speed at which he talked and the complex vocabulary he used really disguised what I perceived to be both a lack of deep understanding of the material and also a lack of self-awareness that he didn't have deep understanding! I've def met people who disagree with me online who I think *do* engage deeply with the concepts, but this specific one didn't, and it was a little blackpilling for me to realize that he had such a following from a bunch of people who couldn't tell the difference.

Update and observations, 6 weeks into learning Mandarin: 1) Paul Noble’s Mandarin course has its pros and cons. The course is aimed at low-investment learners who tend to quit languages.* In an effort to keep them interested in Mandarin, it avoids frontloading pronunciation drills and tells you to “copy the native speakers.” It does slowly teach the consonants and tones of words, but the effect is that you have to relearn things you did earlier, or seek out other resources like… 2) Feyd Rautha on YouTube (“Mandarin Blueprint”). This man is invaluable to any Mandarin learner. Many native speakers are very good at telling you “something is wrong” (or just shuddering when you make a mistake), but are not good at telling you how to fix it. This Englishman tells you exactly where to position your tongue. 3) Apparently Mandarin has “accents” like English does, according to my partner. Eg the southern regions (and 🇹🇼) speak with less retroflexed consonants than the northern ones do. This makes the southern variants a bit easier for an Anglophone. And fortunately, I will only ever go to 🇹🇼. 4) The characters are tough to learn, but they have an odd beauty and mystique to them. People on here talk a lot about Bronze Age Mindsets, but learning characters is as close as it gets to experiencing a Bronze Age society (the Minoans and Hittites gradually abandoned logograms in the 2nd millennium BC, I’m still wondering why Chinese kept at it). —- *This is probably the correct approach to teaching Korean. People get into Korean from KPop and KDramas, and tend to be low-investment learners. But IMO it’s the wrong approach to teaching Mandarin. You’re not going to attempt Mandarin unless it’s a do-or-die thing, so the people doing it tend to be medium or high-investment learners. Since you made it this far, you get to see my character practice and a picture from my recent sojourn in Austin!

Roughly 300 athletes took part in Gaza's first official running event in more than two years since the war began. The group ran four kilometers through the streets of Gaza, cheered on by spectators.