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.

Major League Baseball Backs Down Over Pride Night

Temperature check: just three years ago,

In mid-May [2023], the Los Angeles Dodgers baseball team invited an activist LGBTQ+ drag troupe called the “Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence,” whose members are known for dressing in drag resembling the black-and-white habits of Catholic nuns, to appear at the team’s annual Pride event next month.

The group’s members, it’s worth noting, use various sexual and blasphemous stage names that really don’t bear repeating. They annually host a “Foxy Mary and Hunky Jesus” contest on Easter Sunday — the holiest day of the year for Christians. According to Minnesota Bishop Robert Barron, who previously served as an auxiliary bishop in L.A., this year’s performance included one performer using the cross in a pole-dancing routine.

. . . A public outcry from leaders of the Catholic Church prompted the Dodgers to rescind their plans to honor the group with a “Community Hero Award,” as initially announced. But the Dodgers caved to progressive voices and changed their mind again, apologizing to the organization and re-inviting members to “take their place on the field at our 10th annual LGBTQ+ Pride Night.”

This summer, Major League Baseball has been out to tone things down, more or less:

Major League Baseball and commissioner Rob Manfred have allowed individual teams to hold Pride nights, but the league office has told teams that having players wear anything bearing logos for those events is a step too far.

When addressing LGBTQ+ Pride celebrations, Manfred said that the league wants to do its best to “protect players.”

“We have told teams, in terms of actual uniforms, hats, bases that we don’t think putting logos on them is a good idea just because of the desire to protect players,” Manfred told reporters on Thursday, according to the Washington Post’s Chelsea Janes.

“Not putting them in a position of doing something that may make them uncomfortable because of their personal views.”

But not everyone got the message:

As you know, the San Francisco Giants forced players to wear pRiDe rainbow caps. Some players objected to being forced to wear this antibiblical message, so they put little strips of cloth on the caps noting a specific Biblical passage that mentions the rainbow as God's promise to never flood the world again.

It was a small attempt to balance out the compromise of their conscience being forced upon them by the Gay Mafia, Baseball Chapter, and the Gay Mafia could not tolerate that. They threatened to fine or discipline the players daring to safeguard their own consciences, citing fake rules that no player may ever include his own private messages on his uniform.

That's a lie, the league allowed/encouraged BLM messaging on uniforms and cleats.

Major League Baseball was quick to try to put out the fire:

Major League Baseball Commissioner Rob Manfred told Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., that San Francisco Giants players who wrote Bible verse references on their Pride Night hats will not face fines or discipline over the incident, while defending the league’s uniform policy at the center of the controversy.

In a June 19 letter posted to X by Hawley on Monday, Manfred said MLB’s office issued "a routine oral warning" after Giants players added biblical references to caps with the team’s Pride logo. But he said the warning came before the league learned the Giants had not clearly told players they could wear regular caps instead.

"The players were neither fined nor disciplined, nor will they ever be," Manfred wrote.

. . . MLB initially said the writing violated league rules against players altering uniforms or equipment. In his letter to Hawley, Manfred said that rule was collectively bargained with the MLB Players Association and prohibits players from writing, attaching, affixing, embroidering or otherwise displaying messages on apparel or playing equipment.

"The policy is enforced without regard to the substance of the messaging," Manfred wrote.

. . . However, Manfred said the Dodgers and Giants were allowed to keep using Pride emblems on uniforms and hats under a grandfathered exception because Los Angeles and San Francisco are home to large LGBTQ communities and both clubs wanted to show support for those fans.

. . . Manfred said the Giants’ communication with players this year was "inadequate and not clear" and added that some players did not understand they had the option to wear their normal uniform and added messages to the Pride caps "as a result."

As of now, the Texas Rangers are the only MLB teram without a pride night, but "pride night" at sports venues has been a key element of the gay agenda:

While she doesn't believe the Rangers risk losing fans over their stance on Pride, [Rangers fan Misty] Lockhart would prefer the Rangers complete the MLB picture on something that is believed to have started with the Chicago Cubs in 2001.

“I think if it were something where MLB said, ‘We’re not participating in this,’ but the MLB does participate in it. And the Rangers have chosen not to,” Lockhart said. “I think that's where I take the bigger issue, is they have actively chosen not to participate in it.”

. . . “I think it's a private organization. And if they don't want to have it, I don't think they should be forced to have it,” [fan Will] Davis said. “In something like this, this is a way for people to go as a state. We don't want the political stuff shoved down our throats one way or the other, left or right. We're coming out here to have a good time with friends or family and let it be.”

It sounds like pride night is getting to be something sports teams woulld just as soon not have to deal with, which is all to the good.

“This Was Not Winston Churchill We’re Dealing With"

This was Trump's remark the other day about Keir Starmer. But here's my question: were we ever dealing with Winston Churchill? YouTube toff Jacob Rees-Mogg in the clip embedded above characterizes Churchill as "one of the great heroes of our country". He lists several others, including Elizabeth I, William Pitt the younger, Lord Nelson, and the Duke of Wellington, but he concludes, "the greatest hero of them all has to be Churchill". Just yesterday, Keith Humphreys in The Washington Monthly referred nostalgically to the UK election of 1924:

Consider some political history. In the 24th year of the century, the Labour Party won a third of the vote in the general election, a disastrous performance that cost it 40 seats and led to a further descent into minority status. That was the nature of British politics in 1924, whereas in 2024 a comparable level of popularity with voters allowed Starmer-led Labour to gain 209 seats and achieve a stonking majority in parliament. If you had told politicians of previous generations that a massive majority in parliament could be secured in an election in which two-thirds of voters supported a different party, they would not have believed you.

I've got to asssume Humphreys was in some way harkening back to the UK's period of greatness -- but let's keep in mind that this was the 1924 UK election, which put the Tories back in power, and in particular made the heroic Churchill Chancellor of the Exchequer, roughly corresponding to the US Secretary of the Treasury. According to Wikipedia,

Winston Churchill was appointed Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1924 and served until 1929. He presented five budgets during his chancellorship. He was initially sceptical about advice from the Bank of England and leading economists to implement a return to the gold standard. In April 1925, however, he agreed to include the measure in his first budget. It resulted in deflation and unemployment, and was a catalyst to the miners' strike that led to the General Strike of 1926.

. . . Roy Jenkins commented that, the appointment being a surprise, it should have inculcated in Churchill both a respect for Conservative Party ideals and a cautionary approach to a job that he knew little about. Churchill's self-confidence, however, was so pronounced that he showed no such respect or caution.

. . . In his first budget, he controversially announced the return to the gold standard at its 1914 parity of £4.25 to the ounce, the rate set by Isaac Newton in 1717, equivalent to £1 = $4.86. The principal opponent of the proposal was the economist John Maynard Keynes who argued that the measure would lead to a world depression. Keynes later wrote a pamphlet entitled The Economic Consequences of Mr Churchill. Jenkins has pointed out that, as Churchill was a reluctant convert to gold, it is unfair to blame him entirely for the consequences, but it was in the end his decision to implement the measure and he was the one person who could have refused to do so.

. . . The return to gold at the 1914 parity is widely held to have caused deflation and resultant unemployment with a devastating impact on the coal industry in particular – the higher rate of the pound reduced the demand for already declining coal exports.

This policy is generally acknowledged to have brought about the 1926 General Strike, which as I've written here was a cause of bourgeois self-delusion and enmity with the working class, and more imnportantly, the Great Depression itself. Churchill's position during the 1936 abdication crisis was also unhelpful:

Essentially he opposed any marriage between the King and Mrs. Simpson. He felt a natural sympathy for the King, however, and believed that the solution was a morganatic marriage. Under this plan, Mrs. Simpson would become the Duchess of Cornwall but not Queen. The Cabinet, however, did not approve; neither did the Dominions. Churchill’s only hope then became that the King would see reason, accept his duty as Sovereign, and give up Mrs. Simpson. To this end, Churchill began pressing for time—which put him out of step with most of the nation.

Churchill’s friend J. A. Spender wrote to him in shock on 6 December: “How can you suggest that the present state of things should be prolonged for five months. . . . The thing ought to be settled at once.” Another colleague, Leo Amery, correctly perceived that “the country as a whole was getting progressively more shocked at the idea that the King could hesitate between his duty to the Throne and his affection for a woman.”

His precise role in World War II is difficult to tease out. On one hand, he was an orator who rallied morale in the UK. On the other, insofar as he interfered with military strategy, his proposals were disastrous, and the main task of Eisenhower, Harriman, and Roosevelt after 1943 was to keep him on the sidelines. Churchill's main job between the time he became prime minister and Pearl Harbor was to ingratiate himself with Roosevelt and ensure the US entry into the war, without which the UK would presumably be defeated -- but more recent revisionist opinion suggests the Nazis were themselves their own worst enemy.

I think this also goes to US expectations about the UK. The Humphreys piece I linked above carries an air of regret that the UK's best days are behind it, but the slightly different question is whether the UK ever had best days the way we somehow want to imagine them. I keep reminding myself that Washington, Jefferson, Franklin, and the others thought this through very carefully in 1776 and decided we could do perfectly well without the UK.

Keir Starmer Sort Of Resigns

The alt aggregators were teasing Starmer's rumored Monday resignation, or at least his announcement of a transition plan, all weekend, but once the news dropped, only Breitbart had it.

British Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer at times appeared on the verge of tears as he announced that he’d lost the confidence of the governing Labour Party and would resign, but nevertheless set a months-long departure period that will see him through to the end of the summer.

The resignation of British Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer could barely be heard in Downing Street as protesters outside the gate blasted Beethoven’s ‘Ode to Joy’ — the anthem of the European Union — as he spoke on Monday morning. Sir Keir boasted of the achievements he perceived he had made in office before setting out his timetable for departure, confirming he would remain on as caretaker Prime Minister during a summer-long leadership challenge.

The best, though certainly not perfect, analysis I've seen is from Tim Black at Spiked:

Following his resounding victory in the Makerfield by-election, former New Labour hack Andy Burnham is set to return to Westminster next week. Unless something remarkable happens, this will be the prelude to the former Greater Manchester mayor assuming leadership of the Labour Party and becoming our next prime minister.

. . . Labourites and their party’s legion media cheerleaders seem delighted at the prospect. ‘He has delivered hope’, says one Labour old hand. Another has written of the ‘excited anticipation’ leaving the red side [equivalent to blue in the US] of the Commons positively tumescent. Across the board, they all seem gripped by the same delusion – that Labour’s plummeting popularity is all down to the supernaturally unpopular Starmer.

. . . This is desperately wishful thinking. Labour doesn’t have a Keir Starmer problem. It has a Labour problem. It is organisationally and ideologically estranged from its working-class support base.

But here's where I think he slips up:

Labour today is a deracinated, hollowed-out vehicle for the professional managerial class. The only politicians it can produce are different brands of the same technocratic, managerial product.

But Labour hates the current avatar of the West's professional-managerial class, Elon Musk. Yes, he's rich, but he's hands-on, not a rentier. The first months of the Trump 47 administration were dominated by Musk's DOGE boys, a post-millennial version of the traditional corporate "efficiency experts". Labour and the left generally hate all that stuff. Instead, the point I've been making is that Labour is the direct creation of the UK Fabian society, which was comprised almost entirely of UK bourgeoisie from the late 19th and early 20th century:

The standard definition goes on to give a roll call of relentlessly bourgeois figures connected with the movement: George Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells, Annie Besant, Graham Wallas, Charles Marson, Sydney Olivier, Oliver Lodge, Ramsay MacDonald, Emmeline Pankhurst, and Bertrand Russell, to the point that either consciously or subconsciously, these people recognized what would happen to the bourgeoisie in the event of world proleterian revolution, viz, the gulag, and they were above all intent on saving their own skins.

Thus they concocted a strategy of tempporizing indefinitely with the proletariat, offering cures of one sort or another to social ailments that seldom solved much except to keep the bourgeoisie in place. By the 21st century, as a practical matter, the US solved tbe problem of proletarian revolution, first by containing the Soviet Union, and then by allowing the Marxist-Leninist project to collapse of its own weight. It's worth pointing out that NATO and similar alliances were constructed as part of this containment strategy, but once the Marxist-Leninist model collapsed, they became irrelevant.

Labour in the UK has abandoned even the pretense of working on behalf of the working class; instead, it's adopted programs of importing and then privileging third-world migrants who've been brought in to keep wages down. Other programs, organized and supported by Labour in all but name, are intended to torment and demoralize the working class, such as grooming gangs. Let's get real: the UK uniparty fully recognized over almost the last two generations that the proletarian revolution, the putative threat Fabian socialism was meant to counter and the consensus UK political program of the past century, had disappeared, and the UK dismantled its military as formal recognition of this.

So Labour has dropped its mask. The result is that it's irrelevant, as is the Conservative party that was once intended to counter it. I've been saying for several weeks that changing Labour's leadership is nothing but rearranging the figures standing on top of Lenin's tomb; the next key step is to call an election that will begin to establish the most influential new parties and place them in power. Nigel Farage is belatredly calling for an election:

Reform UK leader Nigel Farage has called for a general election in the wake of Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer’s resignation on Monday morning, arguing that any replacement will lack a mandate to govern the British people.

. . . Although the former Manchester Mayor will not be constitutionally bound to hold a fresh election — with his mandate technically coming from the support of members of the House of Commons — it remains to be seen if he will be able to regain the popular legitimacy that quickly faded away from the Labour Party after being given power in what largely amounted to a protest vote against the Conservatives in 2024.

But this won't be easy to bring about; the big demonstrations that have taken place will need to start focusing on the issue.

🚨BREAKING: MASSIVE crowds of British patriots have flooded the streets of Birmingham to call for remigration.

Britain’s second-largest city now has over 340,000 Muslims.

They want them all gone. pic.twitter.com/PzJ9g8LtX0

— The British Patriot (@TheBritLad) June 20, 2026

Glenn Reynolds On Academic Corruption

Prominent libertarian, transhumanist, law professor, and intellectual welterweight Glenn Reynolds has just run an essay on corruption in universities in the New York Post. I love it when professors stand up and loudly proclaim they're not like the bastards who run the place. The path to tenure is so crowded with choices to take the system or leave it that nobody who's made a career in the academy can claim to be without sin -- but let's leave that aside for now.

Reynolds's latest brought back to mind his transhumanist faith, through which he's publicly acknowledged that he has a contract to have his head removed and frozen at the time of his putative "death", on rhe expectation that at some future date, Science will not only have developed a cure for what finally ailed him, but it will be able to thaw his frozen head out, resuscitate it, reattach it to a donor body, and presumably allow him to resume his tenured chair at the University of Tennessee Knoxville as though nothing had intervened.

I occasionally try to torment my infinitely tolerant wife, a retired insurance attorney, with questions about what the frozen head model of the afterlife would do to the insrance industry if someone proved this could be done -- a likelihood on which Reynolds and others already feel confident enough to have placed serious bets. This time, when I brought the question up again, she was able to counter, "Why don't you ask AI?", which has become her version of "Ask your mother".

So I went to the oracle with this question: "What would be the effect on the life insurance industry if it were proven possible to resuscitate a frozen head and attach it to a new body?" Keep in mind that clients of frozen head enterprises typically finance their contracts by buying a life insurance policy with the beneficiary being the enterprise that proposes to freeze their heads. I wondered if this would actually constitute insurance fraud, since the policyholder would be buying the policy with the expectation that he would come back to life once the policy paid out.

I was actually able to get my wife to help me with my query to AI by specifying that a life insurance carrier could, if it chose, list frozen head enterprises among those whom it will not allow as beneficiaries, but she's not aware of any that have done this. Anyhow, the oracle answered,

If scientists prove we can resucitate a frozen head and attach it to a new body, it would completely disrupt the life insurance industry. The core business model relies on the permanent finality of death.

It went on give what must be a very preliminary and tentative list of changes that would have to be made in the industry:

Redefining the Legal Definition of Death

• Contract triggers must change.
• Policies pay out at "legal death."
• Contracts must define "permanent death."
• Temporary suspension is not death.
• Freeze status might pause payouts.

Restructuring Payouts and Claims

• Claims will turn into loans.
• Payouts may fund the resuscitation.
• Benefits could become medical trusts.
• Families might face frozen assets.
• Fraud risks will skyrocket initially.

In other words, the instant someone could prove you can freeze a head, thaw it out, resuscitate it, and reattach it to a donor body, it would upend the very industry that finances the whole frozen head con, such that all existing frozen head contracts would probably be challenged as invalid, and certainly no further frozen head contracts of the earlier sort could be written. This would almost certainly drive existing frozen head enterprises into bankrupcy well before only a few frozen heads could be properly thawed and reattached -- the scores of thousands remaining would almost certainly be lost before any organized effort could save them.

But let's ask a couple more questions. Glenn Reynolds is a law professor. Not only has he structured his own estate on the basis that he can have his head frozen at "death" and be brought back to life in the future, but he has endorsed those beliefs for the public generally, even though if this were at all practical, it would seriously change the overall legal environment by redefining death. Let's just take another example: currently, you can't libel the dead. So someone publishes a book saying damaging things about a dead guy. Can the dead guy now come back to life and sue the book's author for libel?

Why isn't he publishing books warning of the implications of this, rather than blowing the whistle about how AI will make porn impossibly irresistible? He begins his clarion call on academic corruption thus:

One industry in America pumps out toxic waste day and night, but suffers no penalty for the damage it causes.

It operates at enormous public and private expense, sucking up hundreds of billions of dollars in government money.

He concludes,

And much of what students learn isn’t so.

For example Marxism, which has never worked in the real world, remains stylish on campuses — still treated as a hot new concept, though it hasn’t changed much in over a century.

Racism, sexism, antisemitism and destructive economic ignorance, all from a huge and vastly expensive system that was supposed to make our society better.

It’s time for a change.

But Reynolds himself is ensorsing cryonics, another piece of hokum that's never worked in the real world, and he's using his academic prestige to do it. Marxism as a tool for social analysis has a good deal more merit than cryonics, which at best is nothing but insurance fraud, espeically if it ever could be shown actually to work. If anyone wants a good example of academic corruption, I'd point to Glenn Reynolds a lot sooner than many other people.

The UK Makerfield Election

The UK held an unscheduled election in the district of Makerfield, part of greater Manchester, on Thursday:

British Prime Minister Keir Starmer said on Friday he would not walk away, vowing ​to fight any challenge from his leading party rival Andy Burnham and potentially ushering in a new bout of political instability.

Burnham, the Greater Manchester mayor, won ‌a decisive victory for Labour to claim a parliamentary seat in northwest England, and has signalled that he will use it to enter any contest to replace Starmer.

However, except for the race being a focus of Labour's effort to replace its own leader, Starmer, this would be a dog-bites-man story; Makerfield has been a safe Labour seat for over 100 years. However, Nigel Farage seems to have had a vain hope to win the seat for Reform in an upset:

Nigel Farage says he is disappointed with Reform UK's performance in the Makerfield by-election, as he blamed his party's defeat on a desire among voters to eject Sir Keir Starmer from Downing Street.

The Reform leader claimed frustration with the embattled prime minister had driven Andy Burnham's "emphatic" Labour victory over his party's candidate, Rob Kenyon, who finished more than 9,000 votes behind.

He also conceded his party had also lost votes to right-wing rival Restore Britain, founded by ex-Reform MP Rupert Lowe, which finished third in a breakthrough night for the fledgling party.

Restore Britain is a very new factor in the UK political scene:

Restore Britain is a right-wing to far-right political party in the United Kingdom led by Rupert Lowe, the Member of Parliament for Great Yarmouth. The organisation was officially launched as a pressure group on 30 June 2025 and as a political party on 13 February 2026. It presents itself as an umbrella organisation for local grassroots groups and has been labelled as more right-wing than Reform UK on the political spectrum.

Lowe was elected to Parliament for Reform but formally left the party after public disputes with its leadership and criticism of Nigel Farage. Reform subsequently alleged threatening behaviour from Lowe as a reason for his suspension, which Lowe and his staff denied. Later in 2025, he established Restore as a pressure group, with an initial advisory board that included Conservative politicians such as Susan Hall and Gavin Williamson. The party also raised funds via crowdfunding for an inquiry into the grooming gangs scandal.

Farage also blames Reform UK's alleged underperformance in the Makerfield election on the emergence of Restore Britain. At the second link above,

He issued a plea for Restore voters to back Reform instead, as the main "challenger party to the left".

Reform had sought to defeat Burnham in the Makerfield seat, giving it a high-profile scalp to boost its credentials as the likely main opposition party to Labour at the next general election.

But Burnham increased Labour's majority over Reform in the constituency, in a rare feat for a candidate from the governing party.

One problem for Reform UK has been that several high-profile Conservative MPs have left the increasinigly discredited Conservative Party for Reform UK, casting doubt on Reform's commitment to solve the migration crisis:

The latest high-profile member of the struggling main opposition Conservative Party to jump ship on Monday, January 26 announced she was defecting to the anti-immigrant Reform UK party. Former home secretary Suella Braverman became the third senior Conservative Party figure in less than a month to join Reform, led by Brexit figurehead Nigel Farage.

. . . Former immigration minister Robert Jenrick announced his defection on January 15, days after former chancellor Nadhim Zahawi, who is no longer a lawmaker, also announced that he would join Reform. Braverman's defection brings the number of Reform UK members of Parliament to eight.

Ex-Conservative prime minister Rishi Sunak sacked Braverman as home secretary in November 2023 after she accused police of left-wing bias and said homelessness was a "lifestyle choice." After her dismissal, the outspoken lawmaker publicly condemned Sunak for "equivocation, disregard and a lack of interest" over several policies, including cutting immigration.

Last year saw the second-highest annual number of migrants arrive on UK shores in small boats across from France since records began in 2018. A total of 41,472 migrants landed on England's southern coast in 2025 after making the perilous Channel crossing from northern France.

Reform – founded in 2021 from the ashes of Farage's Brexit Party – won the most seats at last year's local elections in England. That has prompted predictions it could seize power from the ruling center-left Labour at the next general election, due by August 2029. The party is also hoping to make major gains in local elections slated for May.

However, Reform UK appears to have underperformed in Makerfield at 34.5%, while Labour, winning at 54.8%, increased its majority from 43% in 2024. Restore Britain, a party only since this past February, came in at 6.8%. The other parties all lost vote shares over 2024. Although Farage complained that Restore Britain took votes from Reform UK, the two together would have been 41.3% still a landslide defeat. One problem for Reform UK is Robert Jenrick, whose defection from (or ouster by) the Conservatives could lead to the impression that he's an opportunist who will betray prcinciples on key issues.

While he's vociferously supported mass deportations since joining Reform UK, while he was Immigration Minister in the Sunak Tory government, net migration reached record highs. While Reform UK had hoped even to pull an upset in Makerfield, it underperformed. This view in the UK Indepedent may explain why:

The biggest issue for Reform is that it has always depended on the personality and political skills of its leader, Mr Farage, and offered almost nothing in terms of substance, policy or political philosophy.

It is probably not a complete coincidence that their only serious economic policy for most of the past year has been to liberalise cryptocurrency.

. . . Like Reform itself, crypto is based more on vibes without any obvious substantial value. It has an empty quality to it that is just waiting to be found out when the bottom drops out of the market.

. . . And this makes them particularly vulnerable to an aspect of British politics which has been underpriced – tactical voting in the first past the post system.

.. . Some 77 per cent of Labour voters would tactically vote Lib Dem or Green to prevent Reform UK winning. And if only the Conservatives or Reform UK stood a chance of winning in their seat, voters would favour the Tories by 31 per cent to 24 per cent.

It means Reform could still be the biggest party in vote share, but only win a handful of seats.

. . . Meanwhile, Reform has clearly been spooked by Rupert Lowe’s Restore Britain on its right flank.

While Restore did not win anywhere near enough votes to make the difference in Makerfield, its presence has pushed Reform from a trajectory of being more centre-ground back to a core vote strategy based on extreme rhetoric against migrants.

In other words, Reform UK can stand for nothing much and lose, or it could be more hard core like Restore Britain and also lose. Someone is going to have to solve this puzzle.