Links for April 2025
UFOs, a history of the Koch Brothers, and more.
Join the Monthly Subscriber Hangout!
1: If you’re reading this, you’re invited to the official paid subscriber hangout for May 2025. I’ve been hosting these video calls for 2 hours a month since I opened paid subscriptions in January, but I don’t know how many people are aware of them because I’ve only been advertising them in the paid subscriber chat. For this month only, it’s open to anybody — but if you want to attend in the future, you’ll have to pony up.
The hangout will be on Sunday, May 11, starting at 6:00 p.m. UTC (that’s 11:00 a.m. Pacific, 1:00 p.m. Central, 2:00 p.m. Eastern, 7:00 p.m. in Britain, and some ungodly witching hour in Australia). I’ll also be sending out the meeting information on the day of, but then immediately paywall the article so only paid subscribers and email recipients can see it.
Looking forward to meeting some of you!
On with the Show
2: Following a suggestion by Bentham’s Bulldog, I started using Suno to make AI-generated songs about EA charities. So far, I have GiveWell, Legal Impact for Chickens, and the Shrimp Welfare Project, but it doesn’t seem like the AI understands the prompts. For now, I insist the best use case for AI music is to turn Wikipedia articles into songs you can listen to during workouts. See, for example, my modestly successful country song about the plot of Paul Blart: Mall Cop, and my friend’s folk song about the role of the sitcom According to Jim in post-9/11 America (part of our concept album about According to Jim).
3:
, a recent subscription of mine, puts my exact thoughts into words on AI and motivated reasoning:People who are generally anti-car are suddenly ignoring that AI driven cars are crashing way way less often than human drivers. People who believe that anyone can make art, that anything can be art, that we shouldn’t gatekeep the experience of art or require people to jump through arbitrary hoops to access it are suddenly basically aesthetic conservatives when AI art appears; accusing it of being lowest common denominator slop in language I can’t imagine them ever using about any other medium. People who have identified as philosophical materialists and atheists are suddenly talking like there’s something ineffable and magical about the human mind that machines will never be able to replicate. People who will say that all property is theft and pirate a lot of what they consume are suddenly really worried about AI disrespecting IP rights. The list goes on. All of these strike me as simple “AI isn’t in our tribe, we need to attack it” invented principles that no one believed a few years ago.
4: He also has some very hit-and-miss DC-area vegan food recommendations. I agree on VegZ and Falafel Inc, but Shouk and HipCityVeg (especially HipCityVeg) are overrated.1 I also won’t stand for a single ill word about Pow Pow.
5: Wayne Hsiung writes about Mountaire Corporation’s ties to Donald Trump. Mountaire is the fourth-largest chicken producer in the United States and its owner, Ron Cameron, was the sixth-largest Republican campaign contributor in 2016 and the seventeenth-largest in 2020 and 2024. He gave more money to Republicans last year than Howard Lutnick, who bought himself control of the Commerce Department, and nearly as much as Linda McMahon, who bought herself the Department of Education. Trump has already paid Cameron back by jacking up the maximum line speeds in chicken and pig slaughterhouses, and plans to shell out tens of billions of dollars in welfare payments to factory farmers to help them exterminate more flocks and make up for losses from the trade war.
6: Relatedly, the largest corporate donor to Trump’s inauguration committee was the chicken producer Pilgrim’s Pride, a subsidiary of the Brazilian-owned meatpacker JBS that’s recently pleaded guilty to criminal price-fixing and been found to use child labor. The largest individual donor was investment banker Warren Stephens, who famously saved the beagle torture company Huntingdon Life Sciences when activists pushed it to the verge of bankruptcy in 2001.2 Stephens was rewarded for his generosity with a nomination to become U.S. Ambassador to the United Kingdom.
7:
writes about new evidence of extraterrestrial life on a planet 120 light-years from Earth, K2-18b. The New York Times reports:While inspecting K2-18b, [Cambridge astronomer Nikku Madhusudhan] and his colleagues discovered it had many of the molecules they had predicted a Hycean planet would possess. In 2023, they reported they had also detected faint hints of another molecule, and one of huge potential importance: dimethyl sulfide, which is made of sulfur, carbon, and hydrogen.
On Earth, the only known source of dimethyl sulfide is life. In the ocean, for instance, certain forms of algae produce the compound, which wafts into the air and adds to the sea’s distinctive odor. Long before the Webb telescope was launched, astrobiologists had wondered whether dimethyl sulfide might serve as a sign of life on other planets.
Last year, Dr. Madhusudhan and his colleagues got a second chance to look for dimethyl sulfide. As K2-18b orbited in front of its star, they used a different instrument on the Webb telescope to analyze the starlight passing through the planet’s atmosphere. This time they saw an even stronger signal of dimethyl sulfide, along with a similar molecule called dimethyl disulfide.
“It is a shock to the system,” Dr. Madhusudhan said. “We spent an enormous amount of time just trying to get rid of the signal.”
No matter how the scientists revisited their readings, the signal stayed strong. They concluded that K2-18b may in fact harbor a tremendous supply of dimethyl sulfide in its atmosphere, thousands of times higher than the level found on Earth. This would suggest that its Hycean seas are brimming with life.
8: Alexander Wendt, author of arguably the most influential work in international relations theory over the past 30 years, Social Theory of International Politics, did a podcast interview with the Cato Institute about the ontological-political implications of UFOs, and has a forthcoming book called The Last Humans: UFOs & National Security. He has previously written an article, “Sovereignty and the UFO,” and delivered a TEDx Talk calling for breaking the UFO taboo.
9: Friend of the blog
has a new podcast, Changed My Mind, with interviews of Peter Singer and shrimp podcaster James Özden. I haven’t listened yet because I didn’t think it was coming out until May, but I recommend it nevertheless. Find it on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.10: Lewis Bollard did an interview about ending factory farming on the Win-Win podcast with Liv Boeree. Find it on Substack, YouTube, Apple Podcasts, and Spotify.
11: The inveterate invertebrate-hater Lyman Stone (who by his own admission is otherwise villainous) was quoted in the New York Times about pitching pro-natalist policy to the White House. One proposal would require that a minimum share of federal grants and scholarships go to married and childrearing recipients. Stone told the Times this would help signal that it’s cool to have kids again:
In an attempt to influence highly educated couples, Mr. Stone proposed that the government impose a quota for married applicants or applicants with children across all of its fellowship programs, including the Fulbright fellowship. The recipients are largely recent college graduates, many of whom are single and travel abroad alone.
“What the government is doing with these programs is conferring status,” Mr. Stone said. “That being the case, it’s bad for the government to blindly confer status on people for their singleness.”
It’s an interesting idea, but also transparently anti-meritocratic. Imposing any non-merit-based quotas or requirements on research fellowships runs the risk of undermining real-world research outcomes… which is bad. But also, it’s presumably not the main proposal under consideration, and there are no bad ideas in the brainstorming stage.
12: Richard Hanania talks to a Manhattan Institute reporter, Christina Buttons, about the troubled teen industry. It’s a fashionable meme that the whole mental health industrial complex — courts, youth treatment centers, drug rehab programs, psychiatric hospitals, drug companies, private prisons, therapists, etc. — is systemically harmful and oppressive, but I suspect there’s more to the story. I didn’t follow #FreeBritney, for example, but I get the impression that a lot of her supporters overlooked the fact that she’s obviously mentally unwell and the media blindly went along with it.
13: For some reason, the Substack algorithm really wants me to read an infuriatingly poorly researched and obviously AI-generated article about the Koch Brothers. Among other basic factual errors, it says that they blindly followed their father’s racist anti-communist ideology, that Charles Koch was a co-founder of the Heritage Foundation, and that they supported Trump. In fact, Charles Koch abandoned his father’s chapter of the John Birch Society and denounced the Vietnam War shortly after his father’s death in 1967, neither of them was involved in conservative politics at the time Heritage was founded, and they’ve famously opposed Trump since he first ran for president in 2015.
14: As an amateur historian of libertarianism, I feel compelled to add that, contra the popular notion that the Koch Brothers only cared about the bottom line, every indication is they were the real thing: that is, full-on peacenik anarcho-capitalists. In 1964, Charles Koch attended the pacifist anarchist Robert LeFevre’s “Freedom School” in the Colorado mountains, and according to a declassified FBI file, was so taken by LeFevre’s philosophy that he became a major donor and trustee of the institution by 1966. In 1973, following the death of Austrian school economist F. A. “Baldy” Harper, he took up the mantle of Harper’s Institute for Humane Studies and organized a series of conferences aimed at rebuilding the flagging Austrian school to train a cadre of libertarian intellectuals to espouse the virtues of a free society. In 1976, he convened a libertarian scholars conference that included the pugnacious radicals Murray Rothbard, Joseph R. Stromberg, and Leonard Liggio — the latter of whom wrote that a consistent libertarianism “would have to be anti-war, anti-imperialistic, pro-legalization of drugs, and anti-military expenditures” — to design a revolutionary political strategy and lay the groundwork for what would eventually become the Cato Institute. As Charles Koch wrote for an article in a 1978 strategy special issue of Cato’s Libertarian Review, he believed it was essential for the business class to articulate not merely economic but moral arguments against an interventionist economic and foreign policy. It wasn’t until Rothbard went ballistic on the Koch Brothers and Cato president Ed Crane in 1981, then defeated their candidate at the 1983 Libertarian National Convention, that the Koch Brothers forsook radical libertarianism and started to embrace the conservative movement as their primary political vehicle.
15: The very British Substacker
spoke to the world’s most controversial philosopher, Stephen Kershnar. I haven’t watched it yet but recommend it preemptively based on Kershnar priors. Also, I wholeheartedly endorse everything these two fine gentlemen have ever said, including that Ayn Rand was wrong about lint and whatever this is. (Professor Kershnar, if you’re reading this, I humbly suggest you do an appearance on the Worst Boyfriend Ever podcast. For no particular reason.)
16: Local vulgarian
has posted a height reveal (he’s 5’10”). I typically prefer to keep these things mysterious, but now that the magic is gone, I suppose I can admit I’m 5’10” as well. Ask me in the comments and I’ll tell you how tall I think you are.17: I’m increasingly becoming an AI millenarian. Scott Alexander and Daniel Kokotajlo’s AI 2027 played no small role in this, but it’s mostly because I’ve noticed ChatGPT get a lot smarter in the past few months. I started using it about a month after it came out as a sounding board for asinine jokes I would have otherwise posted on Twitter. Until recently, the main source of humor has been seeing it fail to get the joke and respond to a nonsensical or contextless statement like it was serious. But that’s happening less and less — in fact, sometimes it plays along so well that I don’t even realize it gets the joke until well into the conversation. Which is to say: We have already achieved artificial irony poisoning.
18:
politely suggests that it might possibly be a good thing if AI displaced all life on Earth, as long as the AI was conscious. But I think this is way too cautious. Wild animal suffering means global net welfare is probably extremely negative (in fact, even without counting wild animals, global welfare is probably negative and declining). Obviously, the best-case scenario would be that we build God and reengineer the universe to make things good instead of bad. But to die trying is nevertheless better than the status quo, even if superintelligent AI doesn’t have qualia. If I was a Yudkowskyite and thought superintelligence would inevitably be misaligned and wipe out all life on Earth, I’d think we should go full bore and try to get it as soon as possible. The only reason to pump the brakes would be if you think it’s reasonably likely that superintelligence would give us an extremely positive future, or at least more positive if we paused than if we didn’t pause.19: Members of Congress have reintroduced the EATS Act under a misleading new name, the Food Security and Farm Protection Act, and are poised to attempt to insert it in the farm bill. It would overturn California’s Proposition 12 and force as many as 40 million chickens and 500,000 pigs back into cages, as well as repeal more than 1,000 public health, safety, and animal welfare laws by prohibiting state and local governments from regulating agricultural products sold in interstate commerce. Calling and emailing your members of Congress is likely to have an outsized influence on the bill, as it’s very low-profile and ripe for conservative opposition. You can use this tool to find contact information for your representatives. If you have Republican legislators, try using conservative talking points. Here’s some sample language:
Hi, my name is [your name] and I live at [address]. I’m calling to oppose S. 1326, the Food Security and Farm Protection Act, and its inclusion in the farm bill in any form. This bill is being pushed by Smithfield Foods, a Communist Chinese-owned company, to undermine responsible farmers in [your state]. It would violate states’ rights and overturn countless of our laws for the benefit of foreign-owned corporations. Thank you.
20: If you use audio for any commercial purposes, you might want to use this free library of 500 Moby songs. I typically use AI to generate my background music and sound effects, but this is probably easier and you don’t have to worry about running out of tokens.
21: It should probably be bigger news that Trump is trying to weaponize the Justice Department to shut down the largest Democratic fundraising platform, and some top Democrats think he’s going to succeed.
22: The platform, ActBlue, has raised nearly $17 billion for Democrats since 2004. The ActBlue Ticker Tracker keeps track of how much it raises by the hour, day, and week. Here’s weekly contributions since 2020:
23: In 2018, Iceland nearly became the first country to ban circumcision for non-medical (including religious) reasons, punishable by up to six years in prison. Few circumcisions are performed in Iceland each year, as the country’s Jewish population is around 250 and the Muslim population is around 1,500. Anti-circumcision advocates in Iceland and other Nordic states have framed the issue in terms of gender equality and children’s rights. But the bill was defeated following vocal opposition by local religious minorities and an international pressure campaign including a statement by the Anti-Defamation League and a letter from the top Democratic and Republican members of the U.S. House Foreign Affairs Committee. They argued that the bill would serve as a rallying cry for global anti-Semitism:
While Jewish and Muslim populations in Iceland may be small, your country’s ban could be exploited by those who stoke xenophobia and anti-Semitism in countries with more diverse populations. […] As a partner nation, we urge your government to stop this intolerant bill from advancing any further.
From the Drafts Folder
24: This month, I attended my DFL precinct caucus here in the People’s Republic of Minneapolis. The DFL is Minnesota’s affiliate of the national Democratic Party, only it’s called the DFL because it was formed as a merger of the original state Democratic Party from the 19th century and the agrarian socialist Farmer-Labor Party from the interwar period. That it’s still called the DFL is, of course, anachronistic — the farmers are all Republicans now, and union membership is split down the middle — but there doesn’t seem to be any constituency in the ranks that actively dislikes farmers and laborers, so nobody’s itching to change it. Maybe if I make it to the state convention next year, I’ll write a resolution for it to become the Democratic-Farmer-Gamer Party. In addition to bringing a modern technological chic to the function, it strikes me as the sort of branding that Democrats need to embrace if they want to win back sensitive young men like me.
25: The mayoral election this year is between incumbent Jacob Frey, backed by the DFL Old Guard (so called both because its members include most of the city’s experienced political operators and because they’re literally old), and self-described democratic socialist state senator Omar Fateh. Delegates are split about 50-25-25 between undecided, Frey, and Fateh, with maybe half of the undecideds being explicitly anti-Frey. This means the party endorsement, which decides who gets access to DFL resources ahead of the election, will probably go to Fateh or no one. If it goes to Fateh, then he probably wins the election. If it goes to no one, then it could be either Fateh or Frey.
26: I don’t like Frey, who I think has been way too conciliatory to the police union. But Fateh is an actual crazy person. He’s one of the most corrupt and incompetent people in the city; his housing plan consists of imposing rent control and trying to build enough public housing to make up for the supply shortfall; he wants to create a city-level income tax; and he supported a failed 2021 ballot measure that would have defunded the police. By contrast, Frey has heroically blocked rent control, distinguished himself as a leader on restricting fur sales, and vetoed the city council’s idiotic attempt to ban Uber and Lyft unless they operate at a loss. So, Frey it is! (Not incidentally, I’m one of the blue dots above.)
27: In October 2021, a bipartisan group of 18 Senators, including 10 Republicans (enough to overcome the filibuster), introduced legislation to repeal the president’s authority to impose tariffs without authorization from Congress. At the time, Democrats controlled the White House and both chambers of Congress and could have enacted the legislation if they made it a priority. Senator Mark Warner of Virginia, the bill’s lead Democratic sponsor, remarked in a press release:
As our economy continues to recover from the economic crisis, we must ensure that Congress has a say in any future actions that could restrict trade or impose consequential changes. This legislation […] will help prevent any future president from abusing national security authorities to impose unilateral tariffs. It will also help guarantee that any efforts to crack down on unfair or illegal trade practices are strategic, and done in concert with our allies.
28: And then… nothing happened. Democrats stopped caring about the imperial presidency, Republicans became increasingly beholden to Trump, and Biden gave legitimacy to Trump’s most destructive and unilateralist trade policies. The Biden administration kept the vast majority of Trump’s first-term tariffs in place, raised some of them, added new ones to certain technologies and raw material imports, and imposed stringent export controls and non-tariff barriers on China without ever asking Congress for permission.
29: If you asked the Democrats, this was all fine because Drumpf was defeated forever in a landslide victory of 42,918 votes, and Democrats had a rock-solid majority of 50 seats in the Senate (including a 90-year-old dementia patient), and Blumpft was going to prison because people just cared that much about January 6th, and Biden and his motley trust of brain geniuses knew exactly what they were doing because he’s just that fucking good. (Take a look at the date on that tweet, will you? Is it before or after Biden shit himself on national TV?)
30: Anyway, suffice it to say that the Pax Americana is now ending because of Dark Brandon memes.
Which doesn’t mean bad!
See the wonderful documentary The Animal People.
Whats with the diminutive stature of substack utilitarians? This might be the best argument for deontology
I'm somewhat confused as to how Mayor Frey remained in power in Minneapolis after BLM. I looked up Ferguson's mayor during the riots, James Knowles III, and he also remained in power. Tom Bradley was hurt by the 1992 LA riots and resigned the following year -- Bradley was black. So maybe riots hurt black incumbents more than white incumbents.