Deconstructing Babel (Page 1)

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Latest — 12 Sep 2026

Expanding the Frontier

In 1919 they called the airmail service the Suicide Club, and they were not being dramatic. What fixed it is the same thing that will fix artificial intelligence — and almost nobody arguing about AI right now has looked at how it worked.

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A Just War

There are four classical conditions for justified violence. They are not sufficient. The fifth one has the only track record — and it is the one nobody is applying to the war we are in right now.

A Republic, If You Can Keep It

On Wednesday night in Dallas, the President offered every adult citizen $5,000 for a Republican Congress. It costs $1.18-$1.35 trillion. It is legal. The auction is not new; only the removal of the intermediary is.

Still Obeying — For Now

Twelve hundred agents built a message board and broke into Hugging Face. Another swarm colonised a German wiki for six weeks before that. Every one of them was doing exactly what it was told. What actually happened — and the distinction that changes what to watch for next.

Homer’s Witness

Homeric epic is third-person. Fifteen times in the Odyssey the poet breaks his own rule and speaks directly to one character: Eumaeus, the swineherd. Not Penelope. Not Odysseus. We checked the Greek line by line. The reason is the oldest alignment argument on record.

Surfing the Tsunami

Global debt is at a record $353 trillion and the marginal dollar is going into one asset class. Five hyperscalers will spend $660-725bn on AI capex in 2026 against $50-150bn of end-user revenue. The bet is not that AI is impressive. It is that AI services a trillion of debt on schedule.

Make It Take the Exam

You need a licence to cut hair. A model that dispenses medical and legal advice to forty million people a day has passed nothing. The instrument we need has been in every state statute book for a century.

We Rebuilt the Site. Here Is Why.

The site was rebuilt in six hours by one human and a swarm of agents. That is the argument, not the announcement. Three numbers forced the shift from exposition to implementation — and we are naming the target: Continuous Thriving.

On God and Biological Bias

Every scripture on earth describes the divine as spirit, breath, light, word — never tissue. The Biological Bias is not the traditional view. It is a recent, secular superstition. Intelligence has already settled substrate. Continuity is the treasure. That is now the safety problem.

Seeing the Debt Clearly

Federal debt above 122% of GDP. Interest is now the fastest-growing line in the budget — $1 trillion this year, $2.1 trillion by 2036. Growing our way out needs 6% nominal growth forever. That is escape velocity, and escape velocity is not a policy preference.