Links: Weeks of 13 Jun 2026

In medieval times, within the arms race of ever more demonic torture devices, some sadistic genius came up with the idea of the Little Ease.

This was a prison cell built so small in every dimension that a grown man could not stand upright in it nor lie down at full length nor properly sit.

The pain is relentless and without relief and inflicted by one's own body. Prisoners were known to go insane within a few days. A stay at the Little Ease was considered even more cruel than the rack, the thumbscrew, and the other ghoulish machinery of the Tower of London.

A breeding pig will spend her whole life in a version of that box.

These are social, roaming creatures (more intelligent than dogs) who will never leave this corset of steel.

They have been selectively bred to be bigger than their frames can support. Yet we put them in cells so confined that they cannot comfortably sit, and their attempts to do so (for example, by sneaking their limbs into adjacent stalls) reliably lead to fractures and sprains.

They cannot sweat, yet have nothing to roll around in to cool themselves off. Except their own manure, which (contrary to the common misconception) they are so averse to (thanks to their strong sense of smell) that new sows will often suffer from constipation to avoid soiling the space from which they eat and sleep.

Here is how the writer Matthew Scully described what saw at one of Smithfield’s “gestation barn”:

> “Sores, tumors, ulcers, pus pockets, lesions, cysts, bruises, torn ears, swollen legs everywhere. Roaring, groaning, tail biting, fighting, and other “Vices,” as they’re called in the industry. Frenzied chewing on bars and chains, stereotypical “vacuum” chewing on nothing at all, stereotypical rooting and nest building with imaginary straw. And “social defeat,” lots of it, in every third or fourth stall some completely broken being you know is alive only because she blinks and stares up at you … creatures beyond the power of pity to help or indifference to make more miserable, dead to the world except as heaps of flesh into which the [insemination] rod may be stuck once more and more flesh reproduced.”

—

The Save Our Bacon Act is trying to unroll the few state protections we have against this barbaric cruelty - for example California’s Prop 12 - which banned the sale of pork from pigs kept in gestation crates.

It’s incredibly important we don’t end up with this sort of federal preemption.

SOB will not only kill the most important animal welfare related laws in the US of the past decade, but more importantly, it will also restrict ALL future legislative progress (aka how the animal welfare movement has gotten its biggest wins).

The Senate is currently deciding whether to add the SOB Act to the Farm Bill.

With relatively little money now, we can discourage the most pivotal senators in the Ag committee from backing this amendment.

Defeating this bill is even more important given the amount of philanthropic funding I expect to come online in the next year or two.

It will plausibly be over 10x more expensive to repeal SOB than to prevent it from passing in the first place.

All that money that could be spent transforming our society's relationship to mass animal suffering will instead have to be spent just getting us back to where we are right now.

That's why money spent now fighting this bill (and I mean right NOW) is so effective.

If you’re in a position to donate six figures, please DM me.

Prepare for takeoff. ✈️ Flight simulator is now available globally on web to all users.

While I’m no fan of socialism or arbitrary confiscations of wealth, I can see why Bernie Sanders’ proposal (for the government to take a 50% stake in AI companies) resonates, including with many on the right.

The CEOs of the leading AI labs have told us repeatedly that they will cause massive job loss. This is not a story that I believe, nor does the data bear it out, but this is what they have told us. Similarly, they have hyped the risks of AI without putting an equal or greater emphasis on the benefits or readily available mitigations.

Conservatives have another fear. The employees of the leading labs claim to be philanthropic, but what we’ve seen is massive enrichment of NGOs advancing an agenda at odds with traditional values, fueling a revolution against our cities and communities. Soros-maxxing is not charity in our book.

Anthropic and OpenAI have established themselves as Public Benefit Corporations. What could be more in the public benefit than using half the wealth generated by these companies (which trained for free on the collective knowledge of humanity) to pay down the national debt? There is no ideological bias in that philanthropy.

Dario and Sam have begun to walk back their claims of massive job loss, but the damage to public trust is done, and now the chickens are coming home to roost. I could almost support the Sanders proposal as a stupidity tax.

There’s just one problem. Nationalization of AI will accelerate the corporate-government fusion we’re already sliding toward. Conservatives rightly fear a Central Bank Digital Currency. They ought to be even more concerned about Central Government AI — a system with even more totalistic power over information, decision-making, and human behavior.

We saw how social media was weaponized to censor conservatives (including President Trump) in the last Democrat administration. The definition of “trust & safety” expanded to mean protecting the public from supposed psychological harms, micro-aggressions, and disinformation (you know, like hearing conservative ideas or true facts about Covid).

That “safety” agenda as applied to AI will be vastly more powerful and Orwellian. AI won’t just moderate posts; it will curate reality — with the ability to rewrite history, enforce ideological conformity, influence policy at scale, mass surveil Americans, and condition the benefits of the many systems it controls on approved behavior.

America won’t win the AI race if we beat China but end up with a CCP-style social credit system in the U.S. — and that is the danger as the government becomes more deeply involved in AI development and assumes direct ownership and control.

Conservatives are right to fear where this is all headed but ought to think more carefully about how regulations they are flirting with now (that are widely celebrated among those with a long history of lust for Big Government) will be used against them the next time a Democrat administration is in power.