What is the federal bond market

Money and government debt 

Outsourcing our cognitive processes

Learning takes effort.  LLMs remove the effort to get answers/results.  It’s efficient to solve the immediate problem but removes the beneficial side effect, I.e, learning.  How to stay smart is going to be a big challenge.

Specialists in education and cognition have been studying critical thinking and how to develop it for years, and some have useful tips on how to stay cognitively sharp in the age of AI.

research does not yet show clearly what impact generative AI is having on learning and critical thinking. This is because AI tools are relatively new and varied, the studies so far are conflicting, and too few rigorous or long-term studies have been done.  

The illusion of understanding 

Information found online or supplied by generative AI might actually leave people with the illusion that they understand things. One 2023 study found that people who searched online were more confident in their ability to provide explanations for questions — such as why there are leap years or how zippers work — than were people who read information but did not search. But when asked to actually explain the concepts, those in the search group were less accurate

Medicare for all is the best option

Current bills aimed at correcting health insurance issues

are analyzed deeply wrt the specific issues that they might correct, and how they address fundamental issues with incentives 

M4A is superior on all metrics 

Dimension	Three bills	Full AELP agenda	Medicare for All

Extraction / self-dealing rents	Eliminated at source (separation)	Eliminated + enforced	Payer-side removed; provider/pharma persist
Drug & provider prices	~7% drug cut from pharmacy divestiture	Medicare-rate caps system-wide; patent-abuse bans	Monopsony price-setting system-wide
Denial-driven cost & harm	No change ($36B UM tax remains)	UM ban trims it; enforcement-dependent	Profit-motivated denial removed structurally
Risk selection / cost-dumping	No change — pooling untouched	No change; public option itself exposed	Single universal pool eliminates it
Administrative overhead	Marginal	Partial — fragmentation floor remains	Collapses toward 1–4% peer floor
Coverage / uninsured (8%)	No change	Public-option optional	Universal by design
Net fiscal character	Lowers prices; federal outlay ~flat	Large private + public savings; outlay ~flat	Big federal outlay rise; lower totalnational spend in most studies ANALYST

Controlling the narrative

Info wars

To build a narrative that lasts, it is not enough for it to go viral. Virality lasts until the next exciting dopamine hit. You need to institutionalize your narrative internationally, not just let it go viral.

A remarkable CNN Covid story

State of knowledge

As of summer 2026

Covid vaccines roughly halved the chances that a US adult would need to visit the emergency room or be hospitalized with their infections last fall and winter, one study found. But HHS rejected that study from being published in the CDC’s own flagship journal, despite leading the research. It was instead published in JAMA Network Open, a peer-reviewed journal from the American Medical Association.

…

Mild side effects are common – including soreness at the injection site, headache and fatigue – but serious side effects have been generally rare.

…

Covid-19 wasn’t immediately recognized as a disease with airborne transmission with the potential to spread beyond the 6-foot social distancing measure, especially in places with poor ventilation or around activities with heavy breathing.

…

Overall, at least 1.2 million people in the US died from Covid-19, according to the World Health Organization — representing more than 1 in every 7 Covid deaths worldwide, more than any other country.

Logotherapy

Victor Frankl has a view of human motivation

Whereas Freud believed the core drive is towards pleasure, and unhappiness stems from repression,

And Adler believed the core drive is towards power,

Frankl believed that the core drive is for “meaning”

The only way forward

The ecological crisis appears to be a real thing 

Expecting elite institutions to provide the necessary public benefits is foolish 

Tom Harris has a great slide deck with the state of play as of mid 2026

The talk will walk through the physics of climate change using the very latest satellite data to show how the planet is out of energy balance, is accumulating energy at an accelerating rate and how this energy is taken up as heat in different Earth systems. The up-coming ‘Goliath’ El Niño effects will be looked at with reference to past events and the phenomena of temperature ratcheting uncovered, leading to predictions for the second half of this decade. Tipping points are the next topic focussing on the ocean currents and Amazon rainforest as well as the economic consequences of the continued warming. The talk will then look at the triad of measures we still have available to combat the predicament - decarbonising the economy, removing greenhouse gases from the atmosphere and deploying solar geoengineering. Finally we’ll try and answer the question of whether this is a new normal.

Prediction markets

A history 

How Polymarket arose and what it means 

Why we can’t have nice things

Even though we can clearly “afford” them.

Capital refuses

A reading list

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2026/05/coffee-break-the-furies-are-coming-for-us.html

Ashrae standard for airborne virus

https://www.ashrae.org/about/news/2023/ashrae-publishes-standard-241-control-of-infectious-aerosols

Covid zine

On masking in 2026