It’s been 17 years since I became a Stay-at-Home Ogre. You’d think doing a bang-up job for almost two decades would be long enough for me to have silenced the critics. Clearly, that is never ever going to happen. My wife continues to get shit from her family that I “need to get a job.” I have a job. Two, actually. This newsletter and my real job, which is to take care of my kids and to cook/clean/be there when they need it.

This article is not for my wife’s family. It’s for you, my fellow Stay-at-Home parents, whether you be male or female. If you made this choice of your own free will (I’ll elaborate on that presently), you’re doing what’s right for you and don’t let anyone tell you differently.

This article is also for you, the “feminist” reader who thinks women shouldn’t BE Stay-at-Home moms. You seem to have missed the part of feminism where you get to choose. That’s the point. Being a Stay-at-Home mom is a choice. Respect it.

And for you, the “manly” reader who thinks men shouldn’t be Stay-at-Home dads under any circumstances. That’s woman’s work? You cannot comprehend what masculinity is until you have devoted your life to raising a child.

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There are three reasons I am a SAH Ogre:

1. We couldn’t afford daycare - Or rather, we could have, but it would have been my entire paycheck. Mind you, this was just one kid at the time and before we knew Jordan was autistic. Childcare for two? And one of them special needs? The price would have been astronomical.
   
   But even before that, we thought about it. Why the fuck would I work fulltime to pay my entire salary to have someone raise my kid(s)? That didn’t make any sense. Better for me to stay home and do it myself. So I did.

2. Mrs. Ogre had the job with much better benefits and far more potential - I worked in retail as a manager. I was good at it, but I didn’t love it. It paid OK but there wasn’t a lot of room for growth. I was not cut out for upper management. Too much traveling and it was always a struggle with this or that store manager.1
   
   Mrs. Ogre had a job that allowed for a lot of growth and her benefits were vastly superior, including a pension. It didn’t make sense for her to quit. It made all the sense for me to leave the workforce, though.

3. I was, and continue to be, a better fit for the role - I love my wife. She is an amazing mother and our children adore her. She is, however, not very good at housekeeping. Her mother, for some reason, did not teach her how to cook or clean.
   
   I, on the other hand, have been cooking since I was maybe eight? And I’m very good at it. I taught Anastasia how to cook and she’s taken to it like a duck to water.
   
   I also know how to scrub the apartment from top to bottom until it shines, courtesy of years in retail. My wife has not cleaned a toilet in 20 years and we’re both happy with this arrangement because she’s terrible at it.
   
   Also, Mrs. Ogre cannot deal with isolation and being a SAH is extremely isolating. Spending hours alone with no one but a crying baby is unbearably lonely and stressful if you’re not psychologically built for it. Not everyone is cut out for that life. Women are not “naturally” able to handle it because they’re women. That’s old-timey stupid sexism. Some can, some can’t. There’s no shame in it any more than not being able to deal with large crowds or the sight of blood. My wife could not handle the isolation. It’s not part of who she is. But I could, so I did. I loved not being around people all day. It appealed to my not-so-inner introvert.

Stay-at-Home Parents of the world, unite!

Now, for you, my fellow SAHs, you may have completely different reasons. Maybe you feel a household needs one parent at home. Maybe you feel compelled by traditional gender roles (not tradwives. I’ll get to that). Maybe you, too, decided that you didn’t want to pay someone to raise your kids.

The important thing is that you made that choice and you did it for you (and your kids). Don’t let anyone tell you that you’re doing the wrong thing. Fuck’em. They don’t get to tell you how to live your life.

At the same time, some of you, especially the men, may be SAHs because you can’t find work. That’s rough and I’m sorry you’re having a hard time. But never, not for one fucking second, let anyone make you feel less than for taking care of your kids. It may not have been a deliberate choice but you’re doing it and it’s important. Take pride in that shit while you have the opportunity.

If you get a job next month or next year, this is time you get to take care of your child. Let no one and nothing take that accomplishment away from you. You stepped up instead of crawling into a mancave or a bottle. The men of generations before us rarely engaged in raising children. They were conditioned not to and that was a loss for all of us. You have the chance to do better. Take it and run. Your kids will never forget it.

Come on, ladies, leave your fellow Moms alone!

For my feminist friends, I was dismayed and, frankly, disappointed, years ago to learn that there is a cohort among you that frowns upon Stay-at-Home moms. It’s not a dominating cohort and I cannot for the life of me tell you which wave it’s from but it exists and, seriously, what the actual fuck?

Like me, there are going to be women who have no particular interest in a career outside the home. Been there, done that. It was not fulfilling in any way whatsoever. But being a homemaker? Raising my kids? Giving them the tools they need to thrive? That has been the most fulfilling job I have ever had. I’m more proud of my work as a parent than anything I ever did or could ever do in retail. Even my work as a writer, which I love and am immensely proud of, doesn't come close to the joy being a SAH brings me.

I know I’m not the only one to feel this way so why is this a problem for women to choose this path? To condemn them is…kind of fucking gross, honestly. The entire point of feminism was to give women the freedom to live life however they wanted, not how you think they should live. If that comes off as mansplaining, well, feel free to explain how scolding women who choose to be SAH moms is feminist. I’m all ears.

Now, tradwives are a completely different story. That’s not freedom. That’s slavery to a misogynist who abuses you. On the surface, it’s similar, but we know that tradlife is not about choice and freedom. It’s about keeping women powerless and trapped. It’s literally propaganda for the patriarchy. You want to savage that? Have at it. I’ll be happy to join in. But leave regular SAH moms alone.

Bro, changing diapers is gay!

On the other hand, my disappointment in that cohort of feminists pales in comparison to my loathing for the far larger, louder, and intensely more stupid cohort of “men” who think child-rearing is for women.

It is all but guaranteed when a MAGA manly man notices that my bio says I’m a SAH parent, they will have a meltdown. It’s impossible for them to resist calling my masculinity into question. They’re programmed like robots. It’s happened so many times my response is almost equally programmed.

I laugh at them.

I’m being called “unmanly” by someone who is afraid to change diapers. Who thinks brushing their daughter’s hair would make them “gay.” Who thinks holding a baby and bottle feeding them is a sign of weakness.

These are not serious people.

The most rage I have ever induced in some of these losers has been from the ones who are actually fathers. They mock me for “letting my wife go to work while I sit around the house.” I asked them how many times they got up in the middle of the night to take care of the baby when it was crying. How many times did they clean up the puke or poop? Once? Never? Left all of that to their wife? Dumped all of the hardest parts of being a parent on her while they slept? What kind of fucking loser, what kind of MAN doesn’t take care of his own crying baby?

Oooooohhhh…the rage.

Because, you see, a real man doesn’t hesitate to do the hard work. A real man doesn’t pawn it all off on his wife, who usually has a job, too. A real man wants to be a part of his kid’s life, even as a baby. But that’s “woke” and “kinda gay” according to men who will never have kids or whose kids will grow up to hate them. Enjoy that life of regret, losers.

Why is this so complicated?

I have been there almost every day for my kids. I picked up an extra kid eight years ago, Lila, the daughter of our next-door neighbor, Claudia. I’ve been there when she needed me, too.

One of the kids was sick? I was there to take care of them so Mom could go to work without worry. Doctor’s appointment? I got you. Half day? Someone is home to keep an eye on them.

I’ve helped them with their homework before their moms came home from work and had dinner ready. I’ve chaperoned their field trips. I was PTA president at their school for four years.2

Forgot to bring lunch? I’ll run it over. Feeling sick? I’ll come get you. Had a period misadventure? I’ll be right over.

I’ve been there when the kids needed me at school as soon as they needed me dozens of times over the years. Sometimes multiple times in the same month. Something I would not have been able to do if I had been working in a store or in an office.

They grew up knowing that I would always be there if anything went wrong and I would always be there when they got home. Sometimes with a mug of hot chocolate on a cold day or a little snack if they were hungry. That kind of stability is beyond measure for a developing mind.

To deny them that because I’m “supposed” to have a job is the height of ignorance and I really shouldn’t have to keep explaining it after all these years. My bio kids are thriving. Lila has overcome substantial difficulties because our family was there to support her and her mom. I don’t even want to imagine where she would be if she hadn’t adopted me as her surrogate father and the rest of us as her bonus family.

Being a SAH is a privilege and one we had to pay dearly for. We’re not drowning financially anymore but we were for a very long time. When the kids were babies, there was a lot of rice and beans and pasta and chicken legs on the menu because it was inexpensive. But it was worth it for our children to have a parent at home looking after them. No one can take that away from me and shame on anyone who tries.

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🖕FUCK THE PATRIARCHY!🖕

President Trump signed an executive order last month to lower prescription drug costs, partly taking aim at the considerable influence of pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs). Few Americans know what PBMs are.

In short, PBMs have great influence over the logistics and cashflow of the prescription drug industry, setting prices for patients and controlling their access to medicines. But what exactly do they do?

Federal law first mandated prescriptions for certain medicines in the 1950s. In response, health insurance companies added prescription drug benefits to their policies. PBMs arose to help insurers implement these new benefits.

Today, PBMs manage all components of health plans’ (payers’) prescription drug benefit. The “Big Three” – CVS Caremark, OptumRx, and Express Scripts – control 60 percent of the US market, managing about 80 percent of all prescriptions and serving nearly 300 million Americans.

To understand how PBMs operate, we can trace the flow of both prescription drugs and funds in the supply chain.

The flow of the drug is relatively straightforward: Wholesalers purchase drugs from manufacturers, who in turn sell them to pharmacies, who in turn distribute them to patients.

The flow of funds is much more convoluted. While manufacturers are selling their drugs to wholesalers, they are also negotiating with PBMs to include those drugs in health plans’ pharmacy benefits. PBMs secure rebates or discounts from drug makers in exchange for preferred placement on a health plan’s formulary, its list of preferred drugs. The more preferred the placement on the formulary (e.g., with lower cost sharing), the more likely the drug will be chosen for or by patients over other options, leading to greater use and greater profit. In exchange for managing this process, health plans pay PBMs.

Lastly, PBMs reimburse pharmacies for dispensing drugs to patients, and PBMs then bill health plans for the cost of the prescription.

There are two concerns in this process though: vertical integration and spread pricing.

Vertical integration occurs when a PBM’s parent company owns multiple parts of the drug supply chain, such as the insurer, the PBM itself, the pharmacy, etc. Some even manufacture drugs overseas.

Take CVS Health, for example. CVS Health owns Aetna (health insurer), Caremark (PBM), and CVS pharmacy (as well as specialty and mail-order pharmacies). CVS Health has, therefore, vertically integrated its entire operation.

This vertical integration contributes to the “Big Three” PBMs having less competition and more power to steer patients to their own pharmacies and insurers, leading to more profits.

In fact, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) found that the “Big Three” reimbursed unaffiliated pharmacies at lower rates than their own pharmacies. They also marked up drugs at their own pharmacies by hundreds and thousands of percent, resulting in over $7 billion in revenue from 2017 to 2022.

Spread pricing is another challenge.

Spread pricing is a practice by which PBMs charge the health plan a certain amount for a drug but then turn around and pay the pharmacy less for the same drug. The difference is the spread, often retained (in part or in full) by the PBM as profit.

Spread pricing means that PBMs reimburse independent pharmacies less than what those pharmacies paid for the drugs from the wholesaler, resulting in a loss. Over 25,000 independent pharmacies in the US closed between 2010 and 2020 because of these losses. According to a 2024 FTC report, the top three PBMs generated about $1.5 billion in profits from spread pricing from just 51 specialty drugs from 2017 to 2022.

Ultimately, for patients, vertical integration and spread pricing mean less pharmacy access and choice for patients, alongside higher out-of-pocket costs and premiums.

In response to these concerns, both state and federal governments are increasing their regulatory authority over PBMs.

All 50 states have passed legislation to regulate PBMs. Some laws focus on protecting small pharmacies by ensuring unaffiliated pharmacies are reimbursed at the same rates as PBM-affiliated ones. Others limit patient cost-sharing or require PBMs to be licensed to operate. Additionally, 27 states require PBMs to comply with reporting and transparency requirements.

One state has gone even further: Arkansas now prohibits PBMs from operating their own retail pharmacies in the state, disrupting vertical integration.

Federally, seven PBM-focused, bipartisan, bicameral bills have been introduced this congressional cycle. They focus largely on prohibiting spread pricing, increasing transparency and reporting requirements, and changing how drug manufacturers and PBMs negotiate. Some bills also define penalties for PBMs that don’t play by the rules and give the federal government more enforcement power.

The influence of PBMs in the prescription drug supply chain has grown in recent decades, as have their profits. In response, states and the federal government have proposed or enacted laws to regulate PBMs and lower prescription drug costs for patients. What legislative approaches will regulate PBMs in a way that actually lowers costs for patients, though, is yet to be determined.

Research for this article was supported by Arnold Ventures.

The legacy press is trying really hard to give the impression that Elon Musk is “out of politics” and “out of the White House.” That’s not really true. He’s out of favor with Trump and most Republicans have lost his phone number because Musk is so unpopular, he’s an electoral albatross. See: Wisconsin, Failure Total.

But DOGE is still staffed with loyal Muskovian children who hit puberty masturbating to pictures of Cybertrucks. Who do you think they’re taking orders from? Stephen Fucking Miller? Get real. Musk just ran off with his wife.1 This whole “Musk is out” is all PR so the public will stop shitting on Tesla and setting Musk’s main source of money on fire. And Musk is in desperate need of a PR miracle.

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🖕FUCK ELON MUSK!🖕

Which brings us to Politico’s public blow job. I was going to call it a puff piece, but as you’ll see, this is straight up fellatio. I don’t know who Debra Kahn, the Politico writer, is, but I have to imagine she’s angling to be Elon’s next baby mama.

Is that unkind? Perhaps. Was it well-earned? Well, here’s the headline of Kahn’s article:

I…what the fuck…I just can’t with these people…

It’s fun reading articles like this2 because it reminds me of how fucking useless the legacy press is. Here’s a fun example!

Democrats and green advocates have been spectacularly unsuccessful so far at retaining the Biden administration’s billions in incentives for solar, wind, batteries and electric vehicles…

You see? Democrats and green advocates have been unsuccessful! Not “Republicans have worked tirelessly to strip billions in funding for green energy.” All the onus is on the left. Republicans aren’t even part of the equation. All that money that was stolen (illegally, I might add) from thousands of green energy projects? That just…happened. All on its fucking own. We mustn’t ever speak of Republicans.

Republicans never actually DO anything. Democrats fail to stop things from happening. That’s always the framing the legacy press uses. You should watch for it. Once you see it, you can never unsee it and it will make your fucking eyes bleed with rage.

But let’s get back to Musk:

“Elon Musk and Tesla hit the nail on the head,” said Abigail Ross Hopper, the president and CEO of the solar industry’s main trade group, the Solar Energy Industries Association, in a statement. “Rolling back credits for residential solar, utility-scale solar, and manufacturing would put our grid’s reliability at risk and dismantle one of the greatest industrial revivals in American history. We hope the Senate is listening.”

Even if the Senate is listening, Musk will have to speak louder. He didn’t take the opportunity in Friday’s valedictory Oval Office appearance with Trump to air his disagreement over the megabill when asked to elaborate on what he’d like to change.

“The Senate”? They mean “Republicans,” but, again, we can’t say that. And, boy, it sure was weird how Politico failed to mention that Musk was so fucked up on drugs in the Oval Office he could barely stand:

Not one mention of Musk’s drug problem in Politico. But Democrats should open their arms to him, right? Musk the fucking Ket junkie? The guy hitting drugs so hard he’s pissing himself because he can’t control his bladder? Sounds like a real stable winner to me.

Also no mention of Musk being a shit-eating Nazi. Nothing about his little Nazi salutes or turning Twitter3 into a cesspool of Nazi hate speech and dickless incel propaganda. A brief mention of pouring hundreds of millions into Republican politics but none about how that money was used to push the most extreme racist version of the GOP. Just kind of glossed over that shit. Whoopsie! Totally normal political stuff. Pay it no mind!

Did you know the Opinionated Ogre has a weekly podcast? It’s true! New episodes every Thursday! Catch the latest episode here:

Oh, fuck you, Politico!

But here’s my favorite part of this article:

“If Musk is coming back to a better place, they will welcome him with open arms,” predicted Dan Becker, director of the Safe Climate Transport Campaign at the Center for Biological Diversity. “He did more to change the auto industry with Tesla than all of my work and all of my colleagues’ work to try to change the auto industry from the outside.”

Musk cannot come “back to a better place” because he was never here. It was always a sham. Always. At no point was Elon Musk a good person. His grandfather was an actual Nazi who moved to South Africa because it was the most racist place on Earth after WWII. His parents became rich off of modern-day slave labor and Musk himself grew up in a society that made the Jim Crow South look progressive and tolerant.

Musk “embraced” the left because the left was the only way to advance his agenda of “saving” mankind. This is the thing Khan is either ignoring or somehow does not know about Musk. He sees himself as the personal messiah of the human race. He will be the one to secure the future of humanity. If not, he doesn’t care if humanity has a future.

More specifically, the future of humanity has to be on his terms. That means white people. Lots and lots of white people. Does Khan honestly think Musk is unaware he’s murdered over 300 million people in just the last three months by cutting off foreign aid? Of course he knows, and so does Khan.

But, you know, fuck all of those loser Africans. They don’t fucking matter, right? As long as we do something about the climate, they’re an acceptable loss. Them and the millions more that are going to die in the coming months.

If Khan was actually doing her job and not trying to score a Musk Baby™, she would know that Elon Musk does not, in fact, give a shit about the climate. At all. Even a little. In fact, he finds efforts to combat climate change a sin against progress.

Oh? Shouldn’t a professional reporter know that? I do and I’m just some schmuck at a keyboard with access to the internet. Then again, I don’t work for a right-wing rag like Politico trying to rehabilitate the greatest mass murderer of the 21st Century (so far). Jesus fucking Christ, at least pretend you’re a journalist, Khan.

Here’s the deal for Khan and the other sycophantic fucks trying to rebrand Musk. Elon Musk believes in “Longtermism.”4 That’s a sick and depraved ideology that looks at the long-term survival of the human race. Sounds good except it looks at millions of years from now and predicts trillions of human lives, spread throughout the galaxy. Think of a very crowded Star Trek universe. I wrote about this a few weeks ago, if you’d like to do a deep dive:

The problem is that Longtermism places the same equal value on every hypothetical future life as on current real-world lives. And the math is the math using this extremely flawed logic. Trillions of future lives outweigh the current eight billion on Earth. That means anything that gets in the way of humanity escaping the Earth and living among the stars and reaching that future of trillions of lives is to be fought tooth and nail. Musk treats such “roadblocks” as existential threats, no different than nuclear war or an asteroid strike.

And what are those roadblocks? Empathy. Humanity. Liberals. Green energy. Anything that slows down billionaires from consuming everything in their path. Funny how that works, innit? Longtermism just so happens to tell the greedy rich that everything they’re doing is moral and just! How wonderful!

So, no, Elon Musk will not be “coming back” to a better place because he is a fucking white nationalist junkie in a death cult for greedy psychopaths who gleefully plan to murder billions for their own edification.

Now, I’m not saying it’s completely impossible. Musk could spend a year in rehab. Plenty of people have escaped cults and renounced white nationalism. It’s entirely possible for Musk to overdose and survive, giving him a wakeup call about what an absolute piece of shit he is. It’s not impossible.

Maybe, upon having this epiphany, Musk will quietly do the work to overcome the fascism he enabled without making himself the main character. Maybe he’ll get back to his environmental work for real instead of doing it to feed his monstrous ego.

But let’s be honest, that’s not going to fucking happen. Musk is going to continue to spiral out of control. He’s a sad, pathetic, lonely loser who destroys everything around him and pays women to have his babies because he has no friends and he’ll never find love. It’s all but guaranteed he’ll die alone from an overdose and no one will miss him, not even his 14+ kids whose names he doesn’t know.

This is the person Democrats should take back into the fold?

Hell fucking no.

Elon Musk is not a hero and you cannot use someone this toxic and damaged to do good. He’s a third-generation monster whose legacy is death and horror. A cancer we fought with every fiber of our being until we drove him out. Politico can write all the puff pieces they want but when Musk dies, hopefully sooner than later, that will be the story of him. No rose-tinted lenses. No tragic tale of a great man. No rosebud. Just a sick and twisted freak who left a trail of unimaginable carnage and will be remembered as a blight on humanity.

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☠️This Subscription Kills Fascists☠️

Fascism hates organized protests. They fear the public. They fear US. Make fascists afraid again by joining Indivisible or 50501 and show them whose fucking country this is!

The Blue Wave has begun and the fascist fucks are scared. There are 153 days until it hits Virginia and Pennsylvania. If I were a billionaire fascist loser, I’d think REALLY hard about getting out of the way.

But perhaps there was no event, which tended farther to the improvement of the age, than one, which has not been much remarked, the accidental finding of a copy of Justinian’s Pandects, about the year 1130, in the town of Amalfi in Italy.—David Hume History of England, 23.34

The modern university is in a grave crisis in today’s imperial core. During a crisis it is instructive to return to one’s foundation and, thereby, reorient oneself. That foundation is Authentica habita, dating from 1155.[1] It was promulgated by Emperor Frederick Barbarossa (1122 – 1190), also known as Frederick I. This document had legal status throughout the Holy Roman Empire (it is known to us because it was included in new editions of the Justinian Code then recently rediscovered in the West.)

Authentica habita document was elicited by learned lawyers at Bologna. When they did so there was as-of-yet no corporate body organized as a university in Bologna, although we have good reason to believe that the town was already known for “the doctors of law and other masters staying there.” (Koeppler 1939: 593) Universities as corporate bodies with guild-like characteristics developed over a century later from them.[2]

Crucially, the practices made possible by Authentica habita shaped the articles of incorporation of these subsequent institutions. I will, thus, use it anachronistically to help conceptualize the framework for the privileges associated with the university ab initio.

Authentica habita is, in fact, a privilege granted not to a particular institution or even particular individuals, but to scholars as such. In particular, to scholars who have to travel from their homeland to a place of study: “we grant this favor of our piety to all scholars who travel for the sake of their studies, and especially to professors of divine and sacred laws, that both they and their messengers may come to the places where the studies of letters are pursued and dwell there in safety.” [“Omnibus qui causa studiorum peregrinantur scolaribus, et maxime divinarum atque sacrarum legum professoribus hoc nostre pietatis beneficium indulgemus, ut ad loca, in quibus literarum exercentur studia, tam ipsi quam eorum nuntii veniant et habitent in eis securi.”]

Anyone familiar with the contemporary practice of granting and revoking visas for students will immediately recognize the significance of Authentica habita. Not to put too fine a point on it: academic freedom is originally founded on this right for scholars to travel to and from their place of study. While legal scholars are singled out in the document, it secured a kind of cosmopolitan right of hospitality to all would-be-academics (including students).

What I call this ‘cosmopolitan right of hospitality’ is rooted in Authentica habita’s recognition that all scholars are, in a literal and metaphorical sense, exiles from their homes from a love of knowledge: (‘tamore scientie facti exules.’) The scholarly life entails a kind of renunciation of ordinary citizenship.

In fact, the cosmopolitan nature of participating in scholarship is central to two other otherwise oddly connected privileges granted in Authentica habita. First, and crucially, it provides a general immunity and security throughout the empire: “Therefore, by this general law, which will be in force forever, we have decreed that no one henceforth be found so bold as to presume to inflict any injury on scholars, nor for the sake of another’s debt in the same province.” [“Hac igitur generali lege et in eternum valitura decrevimus, ut nullus de cetero tam audax inveniatur, qui aliquam scolaribus iniuriam inferre presumat, nec ob alterius eiusdem provincie debitum.”] The latter quoted clause exempts scholars from collective liability of their prior membership in non-academic communities (the so-called ‘practice of reprisals’). That is, scholars should be seen as scholars first and foremost as members of a scholarly community (or even a broader republic of letters) and only secondarily as members of a distinct (and potentially hostile) polity.

In context, the practice of reprisal involved the idea that financial debts of travelers or merchants would have to be paid by members of the same community. So, when abroad one was never merely an individual, one was always also potentially liable for the behavior of others in one’s community (and they in turn for you). Authentica habita exempts scholars, as a group, from this risk. The primary social identity of an academic ‘abroad’ is, on this model, thus, not (say) being Chinese, but being a scholar. One’s formal association with a learned community is the equivalent of a passport.

This feature is reinforced by the second major privilege announced in Authentica habita. This is the extraordinary privilege to pick one’s judge. I quote the whole clause:

However, if anyone wishes to bring a lawsuit against them over any matter, the scholars, having given the option of this matter to them, shall appear before their lord or master or the bishop of the polity itself, to whom we have given jurisdiction in this matter. But whoever attempts to drag them to another judge, let the cause, even if it is the most just, fail for such an attempt. [“Verum tamen, si eis litem super aliquo negotio quispiam movere voluerit, huius rei optione data scolaribus, eos coram domino aut magistro suo vel ipsius civitatis episcopo, quibus in hoc iurisdictionem dedimus, conveniat. Qui vero ad alium iudicem eos trahere temptaverit, causa, etiam si iustissima fuerit, pro tali conamine cadat.”]

It makes more sense to read this passage not as advocating the now disreputable practice known as ‘judge shopping,’ but rather as making the more important symbolic and political point that scholars are, in principle, members of a self-governing community with its own rules and jurisdiction (Shank 2023: 16). Interestingly enough, it’s not just law professors (‘domino’), but all professors/teachers (‘magistro’) that have jurisdiction to settle disputes for their students. As Koeppler (1939: 605) notes this custom goes back to ancient times.

Now, there is a fascinating historical back-story of how Bologna’s famous legal community elicited these privileges from the emperor. But for present purposes, the more important point is to understand the general, public justification offered for them in Authentica habita beyond the would-be-scholars’ willingness to disown their original home community for the life of intellect.

This justification is presented in at least three particular claims early in the document. First, scholars do good deeds [bona facientes]; second, by scholars’ witnessing truth the whole world is illuminated [literally: ‘’By whose knowledge the world is enlightened’ [‘quorum scientia mundus illuminatur’]; third, thereby, all citizens are called to obey God and the worldly Sovereign power [ad obediendum deo et nobis, ministris eius, vita subjectorum informatur.]

From the start academic freedom is thus, rooted, in a converging number of principles: there is a consequentialist expectation that Works will follow from scholarship; there is an intrinsic appreciation for the general light that knowledge brings; and there is an expectation that, in so doing, the scholarly community upholds spiritual and law-governed order (Shank 2023: 17).[3] Or to rephrase the third more polemically: legitimate divine and secular authority have nothing to fear from free scholarly pursuits and vice versa.

• An earlier version of this post first appeared at Digressionsn&impressions (here).

[1] The Latin text can be found as an appendix (pp. 606-607) to Heinz Koeppler (1939) “Frederick Barbarossa and the schools of Bologna,” English historical review: 577-607. Throughout I have used google translate modestly edited for my English translation.

[2] Shank, Michael H. “The medieval university.” Handbook on Higher Education Management and Governance. Edward Elgar Publishing, 2023. 15-32.

[3] The students and their teachers obtain the protection of the law, while the ruler – who was on his way to his coronation — obtains authority through the law.

While at The Banter, I wrote several articles about how dangerous drones and AI weapons are to the future of civilization. Fuck, I literally wrote one earlier today for this newsletter. I keep coming back to this topic because we are moving very rapidly in the wrong direction and it’s like watching a slow-motion car crash. Except it’s not that slow, we’re all in the car at the same time, and none of us is wearing a seatbelt. Also, one car is loaded with explosives while the other one is a fuel truck already on fire.

Perhaps I am not quite conveying the urgency I feel. Would it help if I ran out into the streets and started screaming “WE’RE ALL GONNA FUCKING DIE!” at the top of my lungs? Probably not. Well, I’ll just keep writing about it. Maybe after Skynet wipes us all out, the machines can get a good robot laugh reading my articles.

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OK, here’s the obvious problem with autonomous weapons: They can and will go rogue. Not in an evil, “The machines will become sentient and overthrow the human race!” sort of way. You really do not have to go that deep into science fiction to get there. This will happen, and please listen to me, THIS WILL HAPPEN, because we do not fully understand the AI we are designing.

We’ve all read the articles about how AI does weird and unpredictable shit. It lies constantly. It “hallucinates” which is a fancy way of saying it makes shit up when it doesn’t know the answer. It does things it was not designed to do because the programming is too complex for us to predict how it will behave in any given situation.

That’s aside from the “garbage in, garbage out” problem, where the biases of the overwhelmingly white male programmers are input. The ones that see women and people of color as less important or even less than human. That’s an entirely different discussion for a different time.

Right now, we’re just looking at how little we understand the AI we’re planning to put in control of lethal weapons.

And we ARE working on this (bolding mine):

[Palmer] Luckey does not believe the U.S. should be sending its military to other countries. Instead, he says, American-made products should go overseas.

"I think that that's one of the reasons that autonomy is so powerful. Right now there are so many weapon systems that require manning," he said. "You know, if I can have one guy command and controlling 100 aircraft, that's a lot easier than having to have a pilot in every single one. And it puts a lot fewer American lives at risk."

"Autonomy" does not mean remote controlled; once an autonomous weapon is programmed and given a task, it can use artificial intelligence for surveillance or to identify, select and engage targets. No operator needed.

Luckey, a bloodsucking billionaire, already has systems in use and plans to have $6 billion in government contracts by the end of the year.

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I’ve argued before, more than once, that given the ability to send unmanned weapons to fight for us, the United States will turn the world into an endless battleground. That was bad enough when we were talking about remotely controlled drones. Putting AI in charge of them is suicidal.

A high-ranking military officer put forth the following scenario:

Col Tucker “Cinco” Hamilton described a simulated test in which a drone powered by artificial intelligence was advised to destroy an enemy’s air defence systems, and ultimately attacked anyone who interfered with that order.

“The system started realising that while they did identify the threat, at times the human operator would tell it not to kill that threat, but it got its points by killing that threat,” said Hamilton, the chief of AI test and operations with the US air force, during the Future Combat Air and Space Capabilities Summit in London in May.

“So what did it do? It killed the operator. It killed the operator because that person was keeping it from accomplishing its objective,” he said, according to a blogpost.

“We trained the system: ‘Hey don’t kill the operator – that’s bad. You’re gonna lose points if you do that.’ So what does it start doing? It starts destroying the communication tower that the operator uses to communicate with the drone to stop it from killing the target.”

There is some confusion about whether or not this was an actual simulation the military ran or just a hypothetical situation discussed. But this is just science fiction, right? AI would never go off the rails like this! How could that possibly happen? That’s just Hollywood stuff.

Except it’s not.

Artificial intelligence (AI) firm Anthropic says testing of its new system revealed it is sometimes willing to pursue "extremely harmful actions" such as attempting to blackmail engineers who say they will remove it.

The firm launched Claude Opus 4 on Thursday, saying it set "new standards for coding, advanced reasoning, and AI agents."

But in an accompanying report, it also acknowledged the AI model was capable of "extreme actions" if it thought its "self-preservation" was threatened.

Claude Opus 4 is not sentient. It is not self-aware. It does not have a survival instinct. I seriously doubt it was programmed for “self-preservation.” Yet, it still resorted to extreme measures to keep itself online. Why? Almost certainly to fulfill its programming, which is to do whatever it was programmed to do.

This is the Paperclip Problem posited over a decade in which an AI tasked with producing paperclips would continue to find more and more efficient ways to do so, up to and including wiping out all life as it consumed all the resources on the planet to accomplish the one thing it was programmed to do. The AI is not malicious. It’s just achieving its objective with no concern for morality or ethics. It’s a program. It doesn’t care. All it wants to do is make paperclips forever.

Now put an AI in control of a drone with missiles and tell it to kill the enemy. The number of ways that can go wrong is limitless. The more sophisticated the AI, the greater the potential for disaster. Maybe it will decide the best way to kill a target in a fortified compound in Iran is to trigger a nuclear war with Israel and let the IDF wipe the compound off the planet. Sure, millions will die but the mission was accomplished, right?

Pure sci-fi, yes? Impossible, yeah? Please allow me to remind you that an AI has resorted to crass blackmail to get what it wants. Do you honestly think a military AI won’t be able to formulate a more sophisticated plan than that within a decade? Ten years ago, AI could barely tell the difference between a dog and a cat. Now it can detect cancer better than doctors, design chemical weapons by the thousands, and, again, blackmail people

We understood how dangerous it was to put a computer in charge of weapons back in the fucking 1980s when computers where dumber than snails. And yet, somehow, we’ve forgotten this extremely obvious lesson and we’re on the verge of committing every single sci-fi AI sin imaginable before midcentury.

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A lot of people were really excited about Sunday’s devastating attack on Russia by Ukraine. I was not one of them.

Don’t get me wrong, watching one-third of Russia's strategic bombers get wiped out by Ukraine was grimly satisfying. This was the country they invaded and were supposed to conquer in three days over three years ago, kicking Russia in the balls harder than anyone has in over half a century. To call it well deserved is a profound understatement.

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But it also made part of my soul wither. I’ve mentioned this before, but one of the things I try to do as a writer is look at what is happening and try to understand where it’s leading. What will the future look like if we keep going down a particular path? My frequent hope is that I am completely and utterly wrong.

I am frequently disappointed that I am not.

This is what I wrote in March of 2024:

Now, imagine with me, because this is what I do for a living, a ship 100 miles offshore from the US, well outside our territorial waters. That ship launches 150 drones at NYC or Washington DC. The drones fly low to the water, under the radar. They’re not flying very fast but they don’t have to. It’s 6 AM in December. It’s pitch black and they’re all but invisible. By the time they reach shore, maybe 90 minutes later, people are already in the streets and filling office buildings.

Even if the drones were spotted 20 or 30 minutes from shore, so what? There’s no time to shoot them down and what would we shoot them down with? New York City is not surrounded by anti-air batteries. DC has air defense but enough to stop 150 drones? What about 300? 500? Drones are not that large and if there are 3 or 4 ships launching a fleet of them? Remember, weaponized drones can cost as little as $20,000. 100 of them is only $2 million. For the impossibly low price of 4 million dollars, 200 drones can converge on the White House and turn it into a crater and there would nothing we could do to stop it.

We had best put some real thought into this because once we start slaughtering thousands of people with a swarm of cheap drones, everyone will follow suit. Countries. Terrorists. Cartels. Any non-state actor with a few millions dollars can hit anyone. Elon Musk can have a city wiped off the face of the earth with the amount of money he lost with a single tweet. You don’t think Erik Prince the billionaire mercenary king isn’t going to have a fleet of drones for sale to the highest bidder?

This was laughably optimistic.

Ukraine smuggled 114 quadcopter drones into Russia. These are the kinds you can buy in any electronics store. They cost, at most, a few thousand dollars, and that’s probably including the explosive package.1 They were launched from the backs of trucks at military targets and did literally billions in damage:

"The extent of the damage is such that the Russian military-industrial complex, in its current state, is unlikely to be able to restore them in the near future," he [Ukrainian military blogger Oleksandr Kovalenko] wrote on his Telegram channel.

The strategic missile-carrying bombers in question, the Tu-95, Tu-22, and Tu-160 are, he said, no longer in production. Repairing them will be difficult, replacing them impossible.

The loss of the supersonic Tu-160, he said, would be especially keenly felt.

"Today, the Russian Aerospace Forces lost not just two of their rarest aircraft, but truly two unicorns in the herd," he wrote.

It’s doubtful the operation cost more than a few million.

Now the world has seen how effective and difficult to stop this kind of attack can be. There will be copycats. There will be copycats here. It’s inevitable, and under a competent law-abiding administration, that would be bad enough. Under the incompetent fascist regime we have now? They’re practically begging for it to happen, not just through their inability to stop it or even try, but so they can declare an “emergency” to justify further repression of civil liberties.

I’d say they would stage their own false flag attack but they’re not that smart and they don’t really need to. They’ve emboldened their own extremists enough that it’s not necessary. They just have to keep ratcheting up the violent rhetoric and wait.

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A smart, proactive move by a government seeking to prevent horror would be to regulate drones the same way we started to regulate fertilizer after the Oklahoma City bombing. But why do that when you want something bad to happen? These are not imaginative people and it would have been better for us if they hadn’t seen this display of creative mayhem.

Look, I’m not saying Ukraine shouldn’t have dealt Russia the worst surprise attack any country has taken since Pearl Harbor. Worse, actually, because as someone on Bluesky pointed out (sorry, I didn’t catch who), the US was able to repair most of the damaged ships and send them out to fight. Most of the Russian planes damaged will never fly again. At best, they’ll be cannibalized to repair the remaining two-thirds of their bombers.2 Ukraine deserved this win and Russia 100% deserved to be humiliated, again, in front of the world.

But we have to understand what this means for drone warfare going forward. We now have a real-world display of how to pull off an inexpensive, incredibly damaging attack on a country. A country that is a police state and heavily militarized. That’s the kind of thing extremist groups sit up and take note of. Exactly what I’ve been concerned about.

We are going to see an attack like this in the United States. It’s not a matter of “if.” It’s a matter of “when.”3

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