BYE LARRY

May all the people who ran to his defense over the years be forced to keep him company in retirement.

Former Harvard President Larry Summers will resign from his academic and faculty appointments at Harvard at the end of the academic year, relinquishing his University Professorship — Harvard’s highest faculty distinction — and remaining on leave until that time, a Harvard spokesperson confirmed to The Crimson.

Summers also resigned Wednesday from his role as co-director of the Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government at the Harvard Kennedy School, a position he has held since 2011, according to the spokesperson. He will not teach or take on new advisees.

Maybe one day someone will explain, clearly, why Larry was one of those indispensable men that you just had to have around.

(sorry for worse than usual typos, a combination of phone blogging and THE DAMN HOVERING "AI" BUTTON MAKING IT IMPOSSIBLE FOR ME TO SEE WHAT I AM TYPING)

When Isn't It Insider Trading

Genuinely confused about how one would make that distinction in any consistent manner.

An editor who works for YouTube's biggest creator, MrBeast, has been suspended from the prediction market platform Kalshi and reported to federal regulators for insider trading, Kalshi officials said on Wednesday. It's the first time the company has publicly revealed the results of an investigation into market manipulation on the popular app.

Seems like the whole game is trying to figure out which the insider bets are and then betting with them.

Computer Say Arrest

There will be more and more of this. 

Police arrested a man for a burglary in a city he had never visited after face scanning software deployed across the UK confused him with another person of south Asian heritage.

The guy says the cops obviously knew he was the wrong guy but didn’t care. They took him anyway and weren't in any hurry to release him

And of course in our database society, such arrests will follow people forever. 

Computer Say Yes

Its "creators" (freaky tech weirdos) are basically an apocalypse cult, so this is no surprise.

Leading AIs from OpenAI, Anthropic and Google opted to use nuclear weapons in simulated war games in 95 per cent of cases

[Insert obligatory WarGames joke here]

The longtermist "effective altruism" guys were all in on destroying civilization so that their group chat could emerge from stasis in a few million years to find paradise.

No this never made any sense.

[I bet The Kids Today don't even watch WarGames]

The Opposition

The reasons are pretty obvious.

House Foreign Affairs Committee Democrats have been working behind the scenes to try to prevent a vote on Reps. Ro Khanna and Thomas Massie’s Iran war powers resolution – a measure that would require every member of Congress to go on the record about a potential U.S. war with Iran.

Plenty of Democrats support bombing the shit out of Iran and then forgetting about it 5 minutes later. Another bunch don't want to be on the record either way.

It is extra funny as Dem leadership only makes process arguments (you must ask Congress nicely, Mr. President) against attacking Iran, even though they work to prevent Congressional input.

Leadership at odds with Dem voters isn't sustainable.

Morning

Wanton Wednesday

SOTU

 For the sickos.

Tuesday Evening

Enjoy

Trump Has The Opportunity To Do The Funniest Thing

But if he doesn't do that, you sickos are supposedly in for a long speech.

Previewing Tuesday’s State of the Union address, President Trump told reporters on Monday that “it's going to be a long speech because we have a lot to talk about."

(maybe) 

Sure You Weren't

(I have no idea of course)

Police officers arrested Lord Mandelson at his London home on Monday afternoon because they worried he was a flight risk, his lawyers have said.

The peer's lawyers have told the BBC there is "absolutely no truth" in the suggestion that Lord Mandelson was planning to leave the UK and move abroad.

I suspect he wasn't planning, but if he was then it's a shame they didn't let him.  Peter Mandelson, international fugitive, would be a funny story! 

...Petey's big mad.

It said: “Peter Mandelson was arrested yesterday despite an agreement with the police that he would attend an interview next month on a voluntary basis.

“The arrest was prompted by a baseless suggestion that he was planning to leave the country and take up permanent residence abroad. There is absolutely no truth whatsoever in any such suggestion.

“We have asked the MPS [Metropolitan Police Service] for the evidence relied upon to justify the arrest.

"Peter Mandelson’s overriding priority is to cooperate with the police investigation, as he has done throughout this process, and to clear his name.”

President Deals

Even though his tariff flexibility is now more limited, you can't make deals with a guy who makes decisions because he saw some AI slop at 3:30 in the morning which convinced him that Germany has too many wind farms, or whatever.

The U.S. has breached the terms of its trade deal with the European Union and the bloc is ready to retaliate if necessary, a top EU trade lawmaker told CNBC.

“We wanted to have really stability and predictability. And unfortunately, the government, the president of the United States, has really made a breach of this deal several times,” Bernd Lange, chair of the European Parliament’s international trade committee, told CNBC on Tuesday.

Chaos Agent

One (obvious) problem with tariffs being made on the whim of the mad king is that lack of certainty does make it a bit hard for businesses to plan things.  

The "we are just onshoring manufacturing" pitch, which they mostly abandoned after a few weeks, was transparently ridiculous for this (and other) reasons.

Now there will be even more costs and chaos.

The White House is confident that this will substantially rebuild the tariff regime the Court struck down. But Trump has two problems. First, in all likelihood he can’t yell tariffs and instantly bully the world anymore, which was his main goal with tariffs anyway. His remaining options require longer-term planning; the only tariff available with less stringent fact-finding, an open-ended levy up to 50 percent under Section 338 of the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930 on countries that the president defines as discriminating against U.S. trade or commerce, has never been tried before and would likely also lead to a lawsuit.

But more important, the administration must figure out some way to return the money it’s collected from illegal IEEPA tariffs for more than ten months. And this tug-of-war will roil the rest of Trump’s presidency and beyond, with the possibility for a rerun of this scenario if the newly implemented Section 122 tariffs or others get invalidated by the courts as well.

That Bari Magic

She wasn't going to give in to the Woke Mob, and then she did.

Celebrity doctor Peter Attia has resigned from his new contributor position at CBS News following new revelations about his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein.

“Dr. Attia’s contributor role was newly established and had not yet meaningfully begun,” a spokesperson for Attia said in a statement.

3 weeks ago:

“It’s Bari versus everyone right now on Attia,” a Paramount insider told Sharon Waxman, editor-in-chief of The Wrap, Monday afternoon.

“Update on the Peter Attia situation: We’re hearing there is a battle royale between Paramount corporate and CBS News’ Bari Weiss,” Waxman wrote on X. “She does not want to cut ties w/ Attia and sees it as givin in to the mob. Paramount sees it as an HR matter and that Attia can’t give expert advice.”

Clever Accounting

I suppose you can get AI to do your clever accounting and then blame the computer for it.

A gap in US accounting rules allows Big Tech companies to conceal tens of billions of dollars of potential liabilities for their AI data centres, the credit rating agency Moody’s warned on Monday

This stuff is above my paygrade, generally, but this illustrates the issue pretty well. A long likely-to-be-renewed lease has to be recorded as a debt liability, but a shorter lease with a guaranteed payment doesn't for some reason.

The largest private credit data centre deal is a case in point, Moody’s said. Meta’s planned Hyperion facility in Louisiana, housed in a special purpose vehicle called Beignet Investor that has financing from Blue Owl Capital, will be leased to the company for an initial term of four years, but with options to renew for up to 20. Meta is also guaranteeing compensation of up to $28bn if the value of the property falls.

Obviously this stuff isn't entirely hidden, but the benefit arises when everybody pretends to believe numbers they know are sorta fake. They do that because they are often betting other people's money.

Not precisely the same, but a bit like pretendng a mortgage backed security is AAA rated because it is 51% AAA, but 49% shit (or something like that).  It isn't as if no one can see what's inside, but if we pretend the label on the package is correct, then we can sell it to people who demand the correct label and trust it (and us).

Morning

 Taco Tuesday.

Happy Hour

Get happy 

Might Be Pony Time Soon

 Getting closer.

Just 32% of Americans now say that Trump has had the right priorities, while 68% say he hasn’t paid enough attention to the country’s most important problems. That’s the president’s most negative reading on that question to date during either of his terms in office. At the same time, Americans say, 61% to 38%, that Trump’s policies will move the country in the wrong direction rather than the right one. And Trump’s job approval rating among all adults remains mired at 36%.

The Prince Of Darkness

They arrest people just for passing state secrets to their pedo pal, now.

Peter Mandelson arrested on suspicion of misconduct in public office

published at 17:09

17:09

Breaking

Peter Mandelson has been arrested. Here is the Met Police statement in full.

"Officers have arrested a 72-year-old man on suspicion of misconduct in public office.

"He was arrested at an address in Camden on Monday, 23 February and has been taken to a London police station for interview.

"This follows search warrants at two addresses in the Wiltshire and Camden areas.”

For people who don't follow British politics closely, it's probably a bit hard to understand who Mandelson is.  He was of the Blair era, but he kept having to resign in disgrace. Journalists would declare him to be "the disgraced Peter Mandelson" whose career was inevitably over.

Then, somehow Peter returned. Again and again.  The "disgraced" would soon disappear from his name each time.

They thought it was hilarious to refer to him as the Prince of Darkness, without ever explaining why. We all have a good laugh with our friend Petey, the Prince of Darkness, on our podcast.  Why do we call him that? Haha funny you ask, let's talk about something else.

Most recently, he's been the man behind the rise and and rule of Keir Starmer, a thing British journalists all knew but didn't really tell people (until much later, and even then quietly).  British journalists are like that.  Most people still have no idea, much as they have no idea why his nickname is the Prince of Darkness. 

Constantly Like This

Conservatives and Republicans regularly say things like, "Democrats don't complain when serial killers kill people (bad) so why do they complain when cops kill people, which is good, obviously??? Check mate!!!"

Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, appears to have deleted his tweet after these Democrats responded

[image or embed]

— Sahil Kapur (@sahilkapur.bsky.social) February 23, 2026 at 5:05 AM

Oh Did They Lie To The Courts

Everyone is shocked and will forget by tomorrow when they lie again. 

Hoping for a tariff refund? Don’t hold your breath. Winning at the Supreme Court was the easy part. To understand what comes next, consider how the government survived the legal skirmishes that led to its loss last week.

From the earliest challenges at the Court of International Trade, Justice Department lawyers made one consistent argument against preliminary injunctions: “Plaintiffs face no harm from a stay; they can fully remedy any harms by obtaining a refund of any tariffs ultimately held invalid,” to quote a 2025 government motion. Justice Department lawyers entered formal stipulations in Princess Awesome v. CBP and a January 2026 consolidated proceeding, each promising not to contest the court’s authority to order reliquidation after a final decision. The courts denied the injunctions, refusing to suspend liquidation (the process that finalizes tariff payments) in direct reliance on those assurances. Yet the government now appears ready to litigate those very promises.