Confidence In Universities Continues To Fall

Last week, The Atlantic ran a piece, Higher Ed Is Very Sorry: Universities are studying how they lost the public’s trust:

Just 10 years ago, almost 60 percent of Americans said they had a lot of confidence in higher education. By last year, that number had fallen to 42 percent. Seventy percent of Americans told Pew last fall that higher education is moving in the wrong direction. The disdain has become so difficult to ignore that, over the past year, several universities and higher-education organizations set out to study how they lost the public’s trust—and how they might restore it.

The most insightful of theae studies appears to be from Yale:

The report, released in April, is nominally about Yale, but it could just as well be about the Ivy League in general. It identifies three main areas where elite universities have fallen short.

First, according to the report, these schools lost trust because of their convoluted pricing system; many set exorbitant tuition and use revenues from the richest families, who pay full price, to subsidize the cost of attendance for everyone else. The sticker price of attending Yale, for example, is $94,100 in annual tuition and fees. But families making less than $200,000 receive free tuition. The problem is that many Americans—according to one survey, 48 percent—wrongly assume that everyone pays full price. This contributes to the overwhelming, but incorrect, sense that college keeps getting more and more expensive. (On average, Americans are paying less for college than they were a decade ago.)

This is a peculiar observation, and certainly counterfactual. I asked Chrome AI mode, "Has the cost of higher education exceeded the rate of inflation for several generations?" It answered,

Yes, the sticker price of higher education has drastically exceeded the rate of inflation for several generations, stretching from the Baby Boomers through Millennials. Since 1980, undergraduate tuition and fees have surged by roughly 1,200%, whereas the general Consumer Price Index (CPI) grew by only about 300% over the same timeframe.

Then it added a qualifier that may be behind the statement that "Americans are paying less for college than they were a decade ago":

However, looking strictly at the "sticker price" obscures a major recent shift: over the last decade, the actual "net price" (what students pay after accounting for grants and scholarships) has finally stabilized or even declined when adjusted for inflation.

But this simply transfers the cost to other payers, for instance government aid or the increasing proportion of foreign students who pay full freight, it doesn't mean a college education costs less. And this leaves out studenet loans:

The amount of student debt in 2023 totaled $1.6 trillion, more than twice the amount outstanding in 2008 ($600 billion). That growth in debt significantly exceeds changes in the number of students over that period, which the Department of Education estimates has decreased by three percent among undergraduates and increased by 12 percent at the graduate level.

If college costs are decreasing, why has the total for student loans ballooned? This is counterintuitive at best. The piece continues,

Then there’s the opaque and at times seemingly arbitrary way that elite universities determine whom to admit. Although Yale shields most details of how it makes its decisions, the available evidence suggests that the university often privileges wealth, status, and athletic ability over purely academic considerations. Finally, the report argues that Yale has strayed from its focus on rigor and academic excellence. At the college, the median grade is an A. “Grades, like colleges and universities, no longer seem trustworthy,” the committee observes.

These are two completely separate issues. Admissions criteria, particularly in the Ivy League, are a closely guarded secret, but I've occasionally looked at the makeup of Ivy entering classes here, and that data is public and likely reflects admissions criteria closely. Around 25% are foreign students, just for starters -- they pay full freight and must certainly come from elites. Around 25% are legacies, preppies, and children of major donors.

Around 25% are athletes and DEI, leaving only about another 25% admitted on merit, although there are preferences even within this category -- an applicant from Idaho will get in with lower grades and SATs than one from Long Island. The reputation of the Ivies for being meritocratic is entirely undeserved, and it fed a major crisis for me when I couldn't figure out why so many of my Ivy classmates were such dummies.

The question of "academic excellence" is entirely separate, but in some ways it's related to the cost of college: if the price keeps rising, the parents in particular will want to see a benefit, and if their kids aren't getting As, they won't think they're getting what they paid for. But there's also a direct benefit for the professors and their deparments: if they don't give lots of As, the students won't enroll in their classes, and if their classes don't make enrollment, they're out of money.

So Yale senses that the univewrsities are giving away the game, but the game is the game, you can't change the incentives, especially when you keep raising the price. In a related story, Education Department cuts loan eligibility for college degree programs yielding 'low-earning' jobs:

Bachelor’s programs will now be required to prove that their graduates earn higher median annual earnings than the average high school graduate, and masters programs that their graduates earn higher median annual earnings than the average bachelor’s degree recipient.

If a program's graduates do not meet this threshold in two-out-of-any-three consecutive award years, the program is categorized as ‘low-earning’ and loses eligibility for Direct Loans. Bachelor’s programs in Religion/Religious Studies (53.3%) and Graphic Communications (17.7%) most frequently failed the earnings test, according to agency data.

“If a program cannot show that it leaves its graduates financially better off than if they had never enrolled, it should not be underwritten by federal taxpayers,” said Under Secretary of Education Nicholas Kent.

Oh, no! Those philistines are daring to measure the value of an education by money! But education is far, far more than just money!

[T]he National Education Association, the nation’s largest teachers union, called the new earnings test a “severe regression in consumer protection.”

The union also argued that “an earnings premium alone does not go nearly far enough to ensure that programs lead to true financial stability" and that the rule “abandons advanced degree seekers,” as well as “unfairly penalizes essential but lower-paying public service fields,” which carry non-monetary value.

But if prestige schools charge a premium -- now in the $100,000 per year range -- on the basis of the claim that the're meritocratic, and the degree is an endorsement of the student's merit, then if the claim is hollow, consumers need to be informed and spend their money elsewhere. By the same token, people take out student loans on the expectation that the increased income from their degrees will make it a good economic choice to pay the loans off. Consumers need to be informed if this isn't the case. The Atlantic piece notes that the Yale report notes that "vague and contradictory aims" make it "difficult to judge whether universities are living up to their own standards, and have led to confusion about what universities are even for."

Back in May, I noted Elon Musk's remarks that “You don’t need college to learn stuff. Everything is available basically for free. You can learn anything you want for free.” Especially with the internet and now AI, this is correct, you can get free web access at a public library. An AI query can certainly point you in the same direction as a sophomore-level college course, and the universities themselves are now terrified that students can turn in AI-generated papers, and no one will be the wiser.

So where's the value added?

BBC's Titanic Sinks Tonight

Over the past two weeks, tne National Geographic Channel ran the four-part BBC series Titanic Sinks Tonight, which has its own Wikipedia entry. This is a peculiar new iteration of the Titanic story from the UK side of the Atlantic; the US version tends to concentrate on the "pride" side of the story in songs like "Down With the Old Canoe", while the UK version tends toward hand-wringing over things like the class system, wealth, and so forth. Per Wikipedia,

The series places emphasis on the social class and sex of the passengers, as well as the perceived mistakes by those in command.

The BBC definitely wrings its hands. It's worth noting that of the six talking heads who offer commentary on the action, four are women. Of the women, one is an apparently mandatory non-white, Somali-born novelist Nadifa Mohamed, whose unsmiling face seems to be there chiefly as buzzkill. That they would need to provide an African perspective on the story is incongruous at best, since the Titanic's passengers and crew, from first class to steerage, appear to have been entirely of European heritage.

The series's strong point is the actors who deliver lines originally spoken by witnesses at the 1912 US Senate inquiry into the disaster, as well as a later UK inquiry. These are direct and authentic, but what detracts from them is the comnmentary of the majority-female talking heads. In addition to Ms Mohamed, there is the particularly annoying Suzannah Lipscom, an upper-class woman with a Gorgon-head hairstyle and a nose stud. Her qualifications for addressing the audience are, according to her Wikipedia entry,

Her research focuses on the sixteenth century, in both English and French history, and covers religious, womens’s history, political, social, and psychological history. She has also written and talked about British and European witch trials.

Between her and Ms Mohamed, we get plenty of perspective on the Titanic from both the African and the sixteenth-century women's viewpoints as a way to understand the first-hand accounts of the survivors. What does this tell us about how the UK upper class, as manifested by the BBC writers, views itself? I can only conclude that it looks in the mirror and cringes, and its reflex is to comfort itself with reassurances over how it's making things up with non-whites and feminists.

The Titanic story that emerges from the witness accounts is a terrible cockup, driven more by complacency than pride, with the upper echelon of ship's officers refusing to recognize the ship is sinking and undertake any sort of organized evacuation. Certainly one can look at the disaster as an omen of the end of the old order, but it's also just a small presage of the much greater world disaster that would follow two years later. The question nobody seems to want to ask is whether what led to the Titanic was the same thing that led to the Marne.

Much of the commentary, for instance, focuses on the interpretation of Captain Smith's order to put the women and children into the lifeboats and whether it meant "women and children first" or "women and children only". Thus many lifeboats were lowered with empty seats, with the final result that 74% of the women and 52% of the children on board were saved, but only 20% of the men. Nobody asks, though, about the equivalent sacrifice of a generation of British men in the First World War.

In fact, too little is made of the controversy over whether, following the US declaration of war against Germany in 1917, US troops would serve under an independent US command, or whether they would be used as replacements in British and French units. The US made it plain that its troops were not to be used, as British and French troops were, as cannon fodder. The peculiar eagerness of the British in particular to sacrifice males to the ideals of chivalry seems to be one basis of both the Titanic and the 1914 world-war disasters.

In fact, the whole subtext of the BBC Titanic special seems to be an attempt to avoid the question of who's sacrificing whom in current British life -- this is clearly a deeply uncomfortable topic. The script briefly mentions the workers in tbe shiip's boiler rooms, who gave their lives to keep the lights on, but it speaks much more of the men in first class who didn't make it to the lifeboats -- while providing little insight into the overall question.

On the other hand, it's clearly important to the producers to give women with no particular background in the subject the opportunity to talk at length about it, eapecially an African woman, who's qualified to speak on it only by dint of being an African woman. Men, especially men of the lower classes, aren't given that chance; they're represented only by actors not of their class speaking lines from the inquests, probably with the help of a dialect coach.

I'm not sure if I like the UK at all right now, to tell the truth.

One More Time: Ohio Gov DeWine And The Haitians

Back in 2024, I had several posts on the problems that Haitians on temporary protected status were causing in Springfield, OH, including one on Gov DeWine's support for the program. In this post, I outlined how the mayor profited by renting apartments he owned to Haitians, and that he and DeWine appeared together in a press conference demanding that then-candidate Trump stop making "false allegations" against them. However, at least so far, there's no evidence that DeWine has profited personally from the program.

Nevertheless, in the wake of Thursday's Supreme Court ruling that allows Trump to end temporary protected status for Haitians, DeWine prominently disagreed, although he simply repeated the same 2024 talking points in the CNN interview embedded above:

It is not in the United States's interest, certainly not in Ohio's interest, to have people who are working every single day, who are supporting a family, who are buying houses, starting businesses, and then put deep roots in this country, and really are contributing, and yank them out. I mean, look at what the mayor of Springfield says, Mayor says that is a huge mistake.

Reporting from Springfield cited in the post says that the local Republican establishment benefited from the universal effect of migration: as in the UK and Canada, it drives down wages and drives up rents. In Springfield, it enabled sweatshop amployers and slumlords. NPR's Weekend Edition said as much:

SCOTT HORSLEY, BYLINE: . . . Haitians have become an important part of the U.S. workforce. About 30% work in nursing homes as home health aides or delivering other kinds of care to seniors. Katie Smith Sloan, who represents thousands of senior care organizations, says it will leave a huge hole if those workers are forced to leave the country.

KATIE SMITH SLOAN: They are the backbone. And they are wonderful, wonderful workers that have developed deep, deep relationships with residents. It's just horrifying to think about what the world is going to be like for our members and for older adults and families without these workers.

HORSLEY: Smith Sloan says there have never been enough native-born workers willing to provide that kind of care, at least not at the existing wages. If foreign-born workers are sent away, she says more of the caregiving responsibility will fall to family members or, in some cases, more costly hospital stays.

SMITH SLOAN: We'll see nursing homes closing beds, maybe closing down wings, maybe closing altogether, that just won't be able to accommodate as many people as they could in the past if they don't have a workforce.

That is, a workforce "willing to provide that kind of care, at least not at the existing wages."

Another question is Gov DeWine's apparent charitable ties to Haiti:

Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine's ties to Haiti stretch back 30 years to his first visit to the island nation while serving in the U.S. Senate.

The stop-over visit in 1995 spurred the Cedarville Republican to become an authority on Haiti and to make more than 20 return visits.

On a 1998 trip to Cite Soleil, a slum of Port-au-Prince, Mike and Fran DeWine met Tom Hagan, a Catholic priest who operated a free school.

The DeWines began underwriting Hagan's mission and in 1999 the schools were named in honor of Becky DeWine, their daughter who was killed in a 1993 auto accident at age 22. Becky, who had just graduated college, had planned a career in journalism.

In the past five years, the DeWine Family Foundation Inc. has donated more than $2 million to Hands Together, the non-profit that operates the free schools in Haiti.

Hands Together grew its operations from four classrooms in 1998 to 34 schools on seven campuses across six neighborhoods, serving nearly 6,000 students.

What's puzzling is that, with all the aid and NGO money that goes into Haiti, nothing has changed there, something DeWine himself understands clearly:

"The situation in Haiti is as bad as it's ever been, probably worse than it usually has been," DeWine told the statehouse news bureau. "You have gangs that run most of the country. You have a dysfunctional police, you have a dysfunctional government. The economy is in dire straits. It's a very dangerous country."

So why just do the same-old-same-old? There seems to be some DeWine connection with wealth and traditional philanthropy: his net worth is estimated at $37 million, most of it from inheriting the family business, The DeWine Seeds & Ohio Twine Co. The misplaced benevolence of the very wealthy seems often to increase the net misery in the world -- we need to learn more about how these figures operate.

I'm Not The Only One Who's Reawakened To The Ukraine War

A piece by Fred Fleitz, former chief of staff at the National Security Coluncil under Trump 45, in American Greatness:

In recent weeks, Ukrainian drones have repeatedly struck oil refineries in Moscow and St. Petersburg. Moscow’s main refinery in Kapotnya was hit twice in a single week in mid-June, sparking massive fires that sent thick plumes of black smoke billowing over the capital and disrupting fuel supplies and airport operations.

. . . These attacks are much more than symbolic. They are precision strikes that target the economic engine funding Putin’s war machine. At the same time, Russian forces have suffered catastrophic losses—estimates now exceed 1.3 million casualties (killed, wounded, and missing), with Ukrainian General Staff figures approaching 1.4 million as of late June 2026 and independent Western assessments confirming well over a million.

. . . Russia’s spring–summer offensive has stalled. In April 2026, Russian forces recorded a net loss of territory for the first time in months. Advances in May were the slowest in years. What was once a grinding war of attrition has turned into a strategic bleeding for Moscow, with Ukraine regaining the initiative through superior drone technology, intelligence, and Western-enabled long-range capabilities.

Let's recall that throughout 2025, it was Zelensky's intransigence that prevented a peace deal on terms that were favorable to Russia:

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky reaffirmed [on December 8, 2025] that Ukraine is not willing to concede territory to Russia, as talks over a US-proposed peace plan continue without a clear end in sight.

“We definitely do not want to give anything up. That is what we are fighting for,” Zelensky said. “We have no legal right to do so under Ukrainian law, our Constitution, international law, or, to be honest, moral law.”

. . . Donald Trump Jr., the president’s son, on Sunday suggested that Trump could walk away from Ukraine peace efforts. “What’s unique about my father is you don’t know what he’s going to do,” he said.

Also on Sunday, Trump had criticized Zelensky after talks between US and Ukrainian negotiators over the weekend in Miami ended with unresolved questions over security guarantees, territorial issues and continued concern that the US proposal tilts in Russia’s favor.

Fred Fleitz concludes,

Trump created a framework to end the Ukraine War that did not exist before he was president. It is a realistic path to end the war on terms that give Putin an off-ramp while halting the slaughter. This is not appeasement; it is statesmanship to save lives. History will judge harshly those who let pride prolong unnecessary suffering when a pragmatic settlement was within reach.

But Putin was never the obstacle to a peace deal; the Trump proposal was a generous award of Donbas and Crimea to Russia, which Zelensky opposed. The 2025 Trump plan appears to have left the status of Crimea conveniently undefined, when the reacquisition of Crimea, realistically or not, was the centerpiece of Zelensky's strategy after the 2022 invasion. An article in the Jerusalem Tribune from the past April points this out:

Ukraine felt a shift was coming, but from a different angle. The strike on Saky airbase in August 2022 marked a turning point. This base was one of Russia’s main launch points for air operations against Ukraine. After the strike, Crimea ceased to be a distant target and became an active front. It proved that Ukrainian forces could penetrate deep into the peninsula despite Russian air defenses. This shattered the belief that Crimea was untouchable. Alongside successful ground offensives that autumn, which reclaimed significant areas of Kharkiv and Kherson oblasts, it sparked a hope in Kyiv that Crimea could be next.

But as of 2023, the Ukrainian counteroffensive failed. Although the Kerch Bridge had been damaged by successive Ukrainian attacks between 2022 and 2025, conventional wisdom insisted that traffic had returned to normal, but new reports indicate that since the attacks, only light civilian traffic can use it, severely limiting Russia's ability to bring military reinforcements into Crimea.

Only cars, buses and certain types of rail transport use the bridge. In March and April 2026, Ukraine struck the two remaining rail ferries that also supported military logistics. They are almost certainly undergoing repairs.

"Ukraine has been carrying out strikes on Russian military logistics networks in occupied Ukraine with increasing intensity, enabled by the availability of different effectors, including one-way attack drones and stand-off munitions. The breadth of Ukrainian targeting is also degrading Russian air defences even in well-established priority locations like the Kerch Strait," the update states.

In other words, what we're seeing is a revival of Ukraine's original strategy of 2022-23, in which its initial attempt at a reconquest of Crimea on the groubd was stalled by various factors, especially the Russian willingness to expend lives and resources in a massive attritional battle. At minimum, what we've begun to see is the return of Russian civilians causing traffic jams as they flee Crimea in a panic, which we haven't seen since 2022-23. So far, Putin hasn't acknowledged changed conditions:

Throughout this entire logistical squeeze, Vladimir Putin’s reaction has been defined by total silence. He has not mentioned the Crimean fuel crisis once. In a June 12 address, he acknowledged that front-line progress was moving slower than desired and noted the enemy’s expanding drone operations, but spoke as though the peninsula did not exist. In fact, he has not set foot in Crimea since 2023.

At minimum, this vindicates Zelensky's negotiation strategy over the Trump 2025 proposals, which I frankly find surprising. If Trump winds up in a position to revisit Ukraine peace negotiations, it's hard to avoid thinking Zelensky will be in a stronger position than he was a year ago, when even then he was in no hurry to make a deal. But have Putin's incentives changed at all? If they haven't, the war is simply going to continue.

The Puzzle Of The Continuing Ukraine War

In the second half of 2025, and continuing into February of this year, Trump sponsored a major effort to settle the Ukrane war:

Since mid-November 2025, there has been a renewed diplomatic push to secure a peace agreement in Ukraine.

Fresh rounds of talks were prompted by reports that US Special Envoy Steve Witkoff and his Russian counterpart, Kirill Dmitriev, had been working on a 28-point peace plan.

. . . Many of the proposals outlined in the plan are not new. They prompted concern among Ukraine and its European allies that the plan was overly favourable to Russia and that it reiterated Russia’s maximalist demands for resolving the conflict, including the ceding of territory.

Following talks in Geneva between the US, Ukraine and European allies on 23 and 24 November 2025, a new deal was reported to be on the table. Details of that revised plan have not been made public, but it is thought to be based on European counterproposals that limit Russian gains.

. . . Three rounds of talks between US, Ukrainian and Russian officials, held in the United Arab Emirates and Switzerland in late January/ February 2026, did not achieve a breakthrough. Further talks in the United Arab Emirates, scheduled for early March 2026, have been postponed because of US/Israeli military action against Iran.

As of a couple of years ago, Ukraine seemed to be on the ropes, but especially over the past several months, as US attention has shifted to Iran, Ukraine's fortunes have improved:

Last week, Moscow residents looked up at black smoke hanging over the city as Ukrainian drones buzzed overhead.

It was Ukraine's largest drone attack on the Russian capital since Russia launched its full-scale invasion in 2022. Hundreds of flights were delayed or cancelled, while a major oil refinery on the city's outskirts was repeatedly struck and set ablaze. "If Ukraine is going to burn, your Moscow will burn too," Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said.

. . . The latest wave of strikes has brought the war much closer to home for many Russians, disrupting daily life and eroding their sense of safety.

Analysts say the attacks may deepen domestic anxieties as the war drags on. But whether that discontent will loosen Russian President Vladimir Putin's grip on power — or provoke him into escalating further — remains unclear.

And things have changed in Crimea. Hot Air quotes the New York Times behind a paywall:

The authorities in Crimea, the Ukrainian peninsula controlled by Russia, declared a state of emergency on Friday after weeks of intense air attacks by Ukraine, including a wave of drone strikes overnight that appears to have been one of the largest since the war began...

Ukraine’s assaults on Crimea, meant to isolate the strategic Black Sea peninsula, have rattled everyday life there to an extent unseen since Russia illegally annexed the region in 2014. Gas stations in Crimea have run out of fuel, with local officials banning sales last Sunday. Summer camps have been canceled and children have been evacuated. Rolling power outages have crippled the territory, disrupting water supplies that rely on electric pumps.

Many Russians who had planned to spend their summer vacations in Crimea, a favorite holiday destination, changed their plans. Bookings in Crimea for July and August fell by over 30 percent compared to a year ago, and by 43 percent in Sevastopol, Crimea’s largest city, according to the Russian business daily Kommersant.

Tourists who had already arrived in Crimea were leaving. On Friday, thousands of cars were lined up on the Crimean side of the bridge linking it to the Russian mainland, with none on the other side waiting to enter, officials said.

These advances seem to be based on advances in drone technology:

In the four years since the large-scale Russian invasion began on February 24, 2022, the Ukrainian military has repeatedly introduced a host of aerial, ground, surface, and undersea drones. The greatest emphasis has been on its aerial drones, which have distinguished themselves in audacious operations like the “Operation Spiderweb” strikes deep inside Russia in June 2025. As the Triton shows, Ukraine is broadening its drone armada to the sea as well.

From David Strom at Hot Air, normally a tepid backwater in the Salem Media empire:

I've been writing a few posts recently about the dramatic shift in Russia's fortunes in the war, and many of my commenters have scoffed. I was being a "homer," rooting too hard for Ukraine and buying their propaganda.

No. I, too, thought that Russia would be able to maintain enough of a stalemate in the war that it could never lose. That is why I was critical of Western policies to "fight to the last Ukrainian." I believed that Ukraine should cut a deal with Russia and end the war because it was bloody and useless. Russia was there to stay.

But a funny thing happened when Trump decided to change US support for Ukraine, not that I am suggesting that he intended this outcome: by making Ukraine have to rely more on an indigenous arms industry and less on American supplies, Ukraine dramatically reformed its military, became nimble and entrepreneurial, and is now outclassing not just Russia, but most countries in military technology and tactics.

Odd -- Zelensky somehow cleaned up his act.

Sabine Hossenfelder On AI

Sabine Hossenfelder is a German ex-physicist who several years ago got frustrated with the academic environment, dropped out, and became a full-time YouTube commentator on general science issues. Her commentary on AI is provocative, but I'm not sure if it's entirely well-informed, and it has the problem of trying to talk about an abstraction as if it's something concrete, in other words, hypostatization. (This was my hobby horse when I taught freeshman comp half a cenrury ago.) At 1:13, she says,

The future is not everyone gets a genius assistant. The future is your genius assistant is currently unavailable, because billionaires are using it to optimize tax avoidance. The artificially intelligent systems we currently have are just about to become useful in some domains like coding and text-based tasks. They're still far away from humanlike general intelligence, but we'll get there. . . . Large language models have serious shortcomings. Most importantly, they dson't learn continuously. You train them, then you roll out the update, then you train a new generation. The trend is going towards equipping these models with tools, giving them memoryand adding all kinds of twiddles and thumbs.

Because I was an English major who's done various kinds of writing but made my career in tech, I think I have a clearer understanding of what large language models -- the most visible use of current AI -- actually do. Here's a recent query I made of Chrome AI mode:

John Bruce was a prolific writer for literary little magazines in the 2000s. Is any of his writing still available on line?

It answered,

During the indie "webzine" and literary little magazine boom of the 2000s, John Bruce was a highly active contributor to the flash fiction and short story scenes, even earning a Pushcart Prize nomination for his work. However, because many independent literary journals from that era have since folded or changed domains, a significant portion of his catalog has fallen victim to digital link rot.To track down his surviving stories and records of his work, look to the following resources:

Active Archives and Surviving Webzines

Boundoff: You can still find contributor references and details of his fiction featured in long-standing indie audio and text journals like Boundoff, which published his work (such as in Issue 59) alongside other prolific fiction writers of the era.

The Internet Archive (Wayback Machine): For magazines that defined the 2000s indie lit scene but have since gone offline (such as Word Riot, PANK in its earliest iterations, Zygote in My Coffee, or DecomP), entering the original journal URLs into the Wayback Machine is the most reliable way to pull up his text. If you can recall a specific story title of his, searching it in quotes alongside the name of a 2000s zine on the archive will often yield the original plain-text page.

If anyone is interested, here are two titles that are still around:

• Drive Up Pay Toilet, in Underground Voices
• Backpack, in Lowestoft Chronicle

However, Issue 59 of Boundoff, which AI mentions, was hard copy only. But my point is that this is the sort of thing that was impossible before AI: it would probably have required weeks or months of dogged detective work to locate copies of the zines and find any stories by a particular author. The answer AI gave came up in a matter of seconds, and it's probably all that 99.999% of people need, which they simply never had before. And it came at no additional cost over and above an ISP connection.

On the other hand, I don't think Ms Hossenfelder has her head fully around the subject matter here. Large language models are trained on data repositories. Chrome AI is part of Google/Alphabet, and its repository is all that Goodle can search, which is quite a bit. xAI, now part of SpaceX, uses all of X as its training resource and repository, which feeds ChatGPT. By incorporating X into xAI, Musk was able to monetize that resource and make a loser profitable.

But Ms Hossenfelder is looking for the spark of creativity -- but for this, you have to tell AI what to be creative about. I asked Chrome AI mode,

Can you write me the first paragraph of a short story that looks like it came out of creative writing class?

It answered,

The morning sun cut through the Los Feliz smog, casting fractured, ochre light across Miller’s desk. Dust motes danced in the stale air, settling heavy on the half-empty bourbon glass and the stack of rejection letters that had become his only steady companion.

As I begin to re-familiarize myself with the world of little literary zines of the 2020s, I now see that pretty much all of them have a policy something like, "We maintain a strict no-AI policy. We do not accept work that has been created, assisted, edited, or enhanced by artificial intelligence tools of any kind." The problem is that your average editor will look at the paragraph above, with all the earmarks of lay-it-on-thick creative writing class advice, and determine that this entry is not tainted by anything like AI. Go with it!

I can take only so much of little literary zines. But AI can be great fun, if you know how to use it.

Farage Calls For An Election

The current crisis in the UK is turning out to be a sort of backhand civics lesson for those of us in the US. The UK parliamentary system basically provides for a single set of elections to the House of Commons every five years, unless the prime minister asks the king to call an election, which the king must then do. The prime minister can nevertheless call for an election at any time if he thinks it might strengthen his position, or if he loses a vote of no confidence in the House of Commons.

As of now, the five-year term until the next mandatory election doesn't expire until August 2029, but there are clearly issues in the UK that ought to be resolved by a general election before then, especially migration, even-handed prosecution of migrant crime, and accountability for the decades-long grooming gang scandal. In the US, regular two-year elections for the House of Representatives, along with four-year presidential elections and staggered six-year Senate terms, serve as regular safety valves, as well as do primary contests for all those seats, along with regular and special state and local elections.

But national issues seem to have had little to do with Prime Minister Keir Starmer's resignation:

Thomas Corbett-Dillon, a former adviser to Boris Johnson and a U.K. political commentator, told The National News Desk he did not believe immigration had been a major driver of Starmer’s decision. “I don't actually think it's been a huge part of it,” Corbett-Dillon said, adding that Starmer “has taken hits on this for a while” but that “it seems to be more internal issues.”

Corbett-Dillon described the political instability surrounding the prime minister’s office as severe.

. . . “I think a lot of Americans watching this have heard the news that he's resigned, and they think that means there'll be an election,” he said. “It doesn't mean that.”

In the wake of Starmer’s resignation, Reform UK leader Nigel Farage called for a national vote, saying, “I demand we at Reform demand a general election.”

. . . Corbett-Dillon criticized the process of replacing a prime minister without a public vote, saying, “The UK is really struggling right now because we have these unelected leaders,” and adding, “They're about to appoint a guy who no one's ever voted for to be the new prime minister who gets to do whatever he wants to do.”

In the UK, there are far fewer opportunities, mostly elections to local offices and special elections when a House of Commons seat falls open, but the meaning of these seems to be harder to tease out. The results from last week's Makerfield election appear to have been counterintuitive:

The figures are stunning. Like others, I wrote during the campaign that a really good result for Andy Burnham would be that he gathered more votes than Reform’s Robert Kenyon and Restore’s Rebecca Shepherd together. He did not just do that; he had more than 6,000 votes to spare. Nobody saw that coming; and the element of surprise when the returning officer announced the figures has added force to Burnham’s victory.

. . . The figures are even more startling if we compare the result with the votes cast last month in the council wards that make up the constituency. Reform’s 50 per cent trounced Labour’s 27 per cent. For Burnham to double that is stunning, even after we have discounted the differences between voting for councils and the House of Commons, and the far lower turnout in local elections.

But this still isn't good news for Labour, compared to earlier years:

All that said, Burnham has not lifted Labour back to the heights it once enjoyed. When Tony Blair led the party to its landslide victory in 1997, 74 per cent voted for Ian McCartney to be Makerfield’s Labour MP. As in so many of Labour’s industrial heartland seats, the party has lost much of its support in recent decades. A one-off triumph by an exceptional candidate does not in itself stem, let alone reverse, the tide of history. Assuming he becomes prime minister, Burnham will find that a far harder task than winning a by-election.

In other words, simply swapping out prime ministers is unlikely to fix anything -- it's a move comparable to swapping Kamala for Joe in 2024, but without a subsequent general election to validate or repudiate the choice. Lately I've discovered the YouTube commentary of Thatcherite toff Jacob Rees-Mogg, who outlines his own call for an election in the clip embedded above. He says,

Andy Burnham wasn't elected at the last election as leader of his party, he wasn't the person that people went to the polls to vote for, and we do live in a presidential system, whether we like it or not.

This has me scratching my head. In the US, we do have a presidential system, in which a national electorate votes directly for a president. In the UK, the prime minister's name never appears on a national ballot, only the voters in the prime minister's home district vote for that candidate, who becnmes prime minister only via party machinery. In fact, Rees-Mogg's whole argument relies on the fact that the UK doesn't have a presidential system, notwithstanding he says they do. He goes on,

He didn't stand with other Labour candidates committed to deliver certain things, including not increasing income tax or VAT. He therefore isn't bound by those commitments, because he didn't offer those to voters. And this seems to me to be a major democratic deficit, to the point of being a coup.

But US presidents routinely run on one set of promises, only to break them -- In 1916, Wilson was re-elected on a slogan of "he kept us out of war", only to declare war on Germany a little over a month after his re-inauguration. Bush pere ran in 1988 on "read my lips, no new taxes!" only to raise taxes once he was in office. Was either case a deficit or a coup? He goes on,

[W]ithout a mandate, what authority does he have to say to Labour MPs, "I want you to go through this division lobby rather than that division lobby." It was a problem that Rishi Sunak faced as a conservative that MPs said, "Well, I don't want to do that. You weren't the one who was elected. I don't accept yhour authority."

This strikes me, though, as just a special case of the bigger problem:

Starmer’s exit means Britain is on track to have seven prime ministers in the ten years since the Brexit referendum of June 2016. It also means the country could see its fifth premier in roughly four years, a rate of leadership turnover never seen before in British politics.

For much of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, Britain was associated with durable governments and leaders who often remained in office for many years. Margaret Thatcher governed from 1979 until 1990, while Tony Blair led the country from 1997 until 2007.

Explanations are tepid and non-specific, Brexit, "economic stagnation", "overpromising and underdelivering". But it seems fairly plain that if elections aren't frequent enough, and they hinge on purely local issues when they occur, nobody is going to have a national mandate, and party leadership will be determined by the party machine. That works only as long as there's a national consensus that permits a uniparty, and that's going away in the UK.

General elections on a five-yeaer schedule are too far apart; the US two-year schedule for House elections, held at the same time as alternating presidential and senate elections, as well as state and local elections, appear to work much better. Right now, for any Labour prime minister to call an election, when the alternative is just to stay in power another three years, is a non-starter.

But if the UK were to call a constitutional convention now, a la the French republics, it would likely mean the introduction of things like Sharia law and heaven knows what else. I'm not sure if the UK has good options. It would be better off becoming the 52nd state.