timelets

Now, Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine’s president, is taking the next step, one that would have been unthinkable even as recently as 2024. By word and deed, he’s showing Europe and the world how the post-American free world can preserve its liberty and independence.
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No nation can match American might, but for the first time in my adult life, the moral and strategic heart of the defense of liberal democracy doesn’t beat in Washington. It doesn’t beat in London or Paris or Berlin or Ottawa, either. It’s in Kyiv, where a courageous leader and a courageous people have picked up the torch America has dropped.

He discovers that a seven-headed dragon who lives on a mountain in the neighborhood demands: periodically a maiden asa sacrifice, else he will lay waste the entire country. The sacrifice has been agreed upon and the lot has fallen to the princess. The king promises that whoever saves her shall have her hand and half his kingdom.



-- Stith Thomson. The Folktale, 1978. UC Press.

They [two Trump's posts on Iran: 1. open the f-ing strait; 2. civilization will die tonight] constituted hitting a new bottom, a new and infernal, face-lit-by-flames bottom, in world communications. The posts weren’t showbiz, they were sinister. You destabilize the world when, as the American president, you say such things. You make all the babies in this delicately poised, always knock-down-able world less safe. You rob your own nation of a claim to moral seriousness in the military action in which it’s engaged: You are saying we’re not trying to protect life but plan to attack, and in the attacking kill noncombatants who are members of the targeted civilization. The moral high ground is relinquished. You lower the bar for all potential response. You encourage violent action by trumpeting your readiness for it.

It bolsters the position of your enemies—their animus is justified, their commitment deepened. It allows them to pretend they’re fighting for the continuation of their people and not only the continuation of their regime.

Donald Trump plays the part of the madman every day. His head fake would be sanity. If his advisers thought this was a good negotiating tactic—“Give ’em a little madman theory, Mr. President”—they really are hicks.

Mr. Trump’s trust in his gut seems to have grown overwhelming—not in his reasoning power, not his analysis of intelligence data, but gut.

A lot of gut instinct is pattern recognition—I’ve lived long, experienced much, and know how this movie ends. But that means gut is weighted toward past experience.

Sometimes gut is mere emotion dressed up as instinct. Sometimes it’s wishful thinking that feels like conviction. Sometimes it conveniently pre-empts hard reasoning.

You can trust your gut straight into catastrophe.

https://www.wsj.com/opinion/in-gut-we-trust-dde164b6

“Ultimately, the task of parenting hasn’t changed, despite the demoralization of AI. It’s still about: How can we raise adaptable, grounded humans, who can respond to disruption—and, even more important, who believe they can respond to disruption,” says Dr. Elkins.

Resiliency is the key to functioning in a world moving so quickly under their feet.

Dr. Elkins assures me this will be easier than I think. “If you see your kid is doing a great job tolerating frustration, say, the videogame console breaks and instead of throwing it against the wall they fix it, that’s an opportunity to be like, ‘Hey, you dealt with that really well,’” she says. “Or when you notice flexibility—they were supposed to go to a friend’s house and someone got sick, but they pivoted nicely. You can say, ‘I saw you rebounded really well.’”

She suggests encouraging your kids to take initiative rather than waiting for instructions, to take healthy risks and do things more independently. “These are core skills that research tells us over and over are related to long-term adaptability,” says Dr. Elkins.

https://www.wsj.com/lifestyle/relationships/ai-parenting-anxiety-c054a54b

First lady Melania Trump expressed condolences to families who have lost loved ones to death and injury during an address to the United Nations on Monday that described “these challenging times.”

In an unprecedented role for a first lady, she opened a meeting of the U.N. Security Council on behalf of the U.S. as the country assumed the rotating presidency of the council. “I extend my earnest wishes for a swift and smooth recovery to all those who have been injured. You are in my thoughts and prayers during these challenging times,” Trump said, without mentioning any particular conflict.

https://www.wsj.com/livecoverage/iran-israel-us-strikes-2026/card/speaking-at-un-melania-trump-expresses-condolences-for-the-dead-4oUsYCq5A2LzcAeEHn9Z

We asked Amodei and four other leaders in AI how they think about their own children’s futures and what advice they give them.
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--There are two areas that I think will be vibrant in the short to medium term. One is energy. The other is healthcare.

-- In terms of what he should study in college... I’d rather it be something in the space of mathematics because logical thinking is something that will be required in any future role because of how AI works.

-- My kids are interested in broad careers like law and medicine, so I’m less worried. I think generalist jobs, where there are many different skills bundled together, are good jobs in an AI world. .. A liberal-arts education matters more than ever.

-- Metacognitive skills will be very important—flexibility, adaptability, experimentation, thinking critically, being able to challenge things. Developing critical-thinking skills requires friction, doing things that are hard, doing deep thinking.

For that, a traditional liberal-arts education is really important.

-- So, if anything—and this sounds funny to say about future teenagers—I might orient my kids toward more socializing and understanding how they relate to people in their own unique way.


https://www.wsj.com/lifestyle/careers/what-ai-executives-tell-their-own-kids-about-the-jobs-of-the-future-1ba43f65

“[China] embraced a vision of technology radically different from Silicon Valley’s: the pursuit of physical and industrial technologies rather than virtual ones like social media or e-commerce platforms. In China, technology is not represented by shiny objects; rather, it is embodied by communities of engineering practice like Shenzhen, where technology lives inside the heads and in the hands of its workforce. ”
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Chinese officials climbed over each other to host a Foxconn facility. They salivated at the number of jobs and amount of tax revenues the company could create for their jurisdiction, which could elevate them to higher office. Local officials promised to satisfy Foxconn’s extraordinary labor demands. In Chengdu, minor bureaucrats had to hit quotas on the number of workers to rustle up for factory work; those who failed might receive an order to work at assembly lines themselves.
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A 2012 story in the New York Times reported that Apple needed to hire nearly nine thousand industrial engineers in the earlier days of iPhone production. The company’s analysts expected recruitment to last nine months to hire that many engineers in the United States. In China, they were able to do it in two weeks.

-- Daniel Wang. “Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future.”

Federal prosecutors in Washington sought and failed on Tuesday to secure an indictment against six Democratic lawmakers who posted a video this fall that enraged President Trump by reminding active-duty members of the military and intelligence community that they were obligated to refuse illegal orders.

It was remarkable that the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington — led by Jeanine Pirro, a longtime ally of Mr. Trump’s — authorized prosecutors to go into a grand jury and ask for an indictment of the six members of Congress, all of whom had served in the military or the nation’s spy agencies.

But it was even more remarkable that a group of ordinary citizens sitting on the grand jury in Federal District Court in Washington forcefully rejected Mr. Trump’s bid to label their expression of dissent as a criminal act warranting prosecution.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/10/us/politics/trump-democrats-illegal-orders-pirro.html