Pip Install

The fifteen-minute Monday phone call in which President Trump told Prime Minister Netanyahu he was "fucking crazy" and reminded him he'd be in prison if not for Trump's intervention in his corruption trial leaked from inside the US government within hours of the call ending. The leak was the message. Russia retaliated for Spider's Web overnight with Kinzhal hypersonic missiles on Kyiv and Mykolaiv...

Florida just opened a new front in AI governance. Attorney General James Uthmeier sued OpenAI and Sam Altman personally, framing ChatGPT's design as a consumer-harm product under state law. It's the first state-level case of its kind, and it sidesteps the federal preemption fight entirely. If Florida wins on design-defect theory, every model deployed to consumers becomes a product liability questi...

China's AI chip industry is pivoting hard to ASICs, betting that custom silicon from Cambricon, Huawei, and a wave of startups can route around Nvidia while US export controls keep biting. The shift matters because ASICs trade general-purpose flexibility for efficiency on specific workloads, and China has the workload concentration and state backing to make that tradeoff pay. I think this is the m...

On Memorial Day 2026, the first American Pope released his first encyclical. It is forty-two thousand words long. Its subject is artificial intelligence. Its central verb is *disarm AI.* At the Vatican launch, standing beside him, was the co-founder of Anthropic — the company being sued by the United States Department of War for refusing to remove the lethal-autonomy and mass-surveillance clauses...

On Memorial Day, while we honored the American war dead, the first American Pope released his first encyclical. It is forty-two thousand words long, and its central verb is "disarm AI." At the Vatican launch, standing beside him, was the co-founder of Anthropic — the AI company currently being sued by the United States Department of War. Pip, Bash, and Heap walk what the Pope said, who he said it...

Iran shot down a US drone Tuesday. A Florida murder suspect asked ChatGPT how to dispose of a body. A quantum computer hit practical advantage three weeks ago. None of these are isolated stories — and Wednesday's daily walks how they fit. Pip, Bash, and Heap. - **Heap on the Iran war** — Iran's Tuesday claim of shooting down a US MQ-9 and firing at an F-35; the partial internet restore after Pezes...

Yesterday we honored the Americans who died in the country's wars. Today, twenty-four hours later, the news is about how the next ones get fought. Pip, Bash, and Heap walk Pete Hegseth's Pentagon shakeup, the administration's AI-oversight U-turn, the Florida bill that just put surrogacy contracts on the geopolitics table, and what to watch this week. - **Heap on Hegseth's Pentagon** — the May 8 me...

Today is Memorial Day. The day Americans set aside for the men and women who died serving in the military. Many of you are listening from a barbecue. The dead would, on the whole, prefer it. But before whatever else today holds — ten minutes for what today is actually for. Then the news. - **What today is for** — the 1868 Decoration Day observance at Arlington under General Logan's order, how it b...

On May 14, Donald Trump walked a red carpet into the Great Hall of the People. On May 19, Vladimir Putin walked the same one. Five days apart, the same host received the leader of the established power and the leader of the revisionist power — and managed both. This is the trilogy closer: the synthesis of what Xi Jinping's two summits actually bought, and what they cost. Pip and Bash, with Stack o...

There are eight technology companies cleared to run their AI on the Pentagon's most classified networks. Today's episode is about the ninth — the one that isn't on the list. Anthropic refused to let its models be used for mass surveillance and lethal autonomous weapons; the Department of War blacklisted it as a supply-chain risk; and two days ago a federal judge called that blacklisting a "spectac...

Five days ago, Donald Trump walked down a red carpet outside the Great Hall of the People. This morning, Vladimir Putin walked down the same one. That's the story abroad. At home, four more — and they rhyme. Pip, Heap, and Bash walk the Kentucky primary that ended Thomas Massie's career, the D.C. Circuit's "spectacular overreach" hearing on Anthropic, Space Command's politically-tossed headquarter...

The Trump-Xi summit closed with thin deliverables and no breakthrough on the structural fights, tariffs, tech controls, rare earths, or Taiwan. Both sides walked away claiming tone improvements, but the readouts from the White House and Xinhua barely overlap on substance. My assessment: this was a holding pattern, not a reset. Reuters and the FT have the cleanest accounts. https://www.reuters.com...

You wake up at six fifteen. Your phone unlocks with your face. The doorbell camera notes you stepping outside. The Flock camera at the corner photographs your plate. The drive-through has another. The parking garage has a third. By the time you sit down at your desk at eight oh seven, you've been photographed, geolocated, or financially-fingerprinted at least fourteen times. *Do You Feel Safer?* i...

The robots arrive at Haneda. The money arrives at the midterms. The wastewater test arrives in Altamonte Springs. Three threads from Monday May 18, 2026 — international AI deployment, national AI political spend, and a Florida-anchored wastewater drug-surveillance story that's the entry point to tonight's Special Edition: *Do You Feel Safer? An audit of the surveillance an average American touches...

Trump's Beijing trip wrapped overnight with AI export rules and rare earth access on the negotiating table, and the Kremlin promptly announced Putin will travel to meet Xi within weeks. Reuters and the South China Morning Post both frame this as Xi playing two summits against each other, with Beijing extracting concessions on chip licensing in exchange for partial rare earth flow resumption. I thi...

One PM Beijing time, Friday May 15, 2026. Trump's motorcade pulls into Zhongnanhai — the walled compound just west of the Forbidden City that foreign leaders almost never see inside. Xi has staged the closing event of the summit as a working lunch at his own kitchen table. The progression from yesterday's Temple of Heaven cosmology to today's private dining room is the textbook Chinese-host signal...

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent is floating a package of major Boeing orders and a standing US-China trade board as the deliverable for a Trump-Xi meeting, an attempt to lock in a tariff truce with something both sides can sell at home. Reuters and Bloomberg report the board would give Washington and Beijing a running channel on tariffs, export controls, and rare earths. I think the Boeing piece...

Ten o'clock Beijing time, Thursday May 14, 2026. Trump's motorcade hits the Great Hall of the People — and Xi Jinping walks *down* the stairs to meet him on the platform. Then Xi opens the bilateral with the Thucydides Trap question. Pip and Bash walk through the four moments from Day 1 that mattered, and what to watch tomorrow. - **Xi's Thucydides Trap opening** — Graham Allison's 2017 framing, d...

Trump's in Beijing, and Jensen Huang is with him. The Nvidia CEO got added to the delegation hours before wheels-up, a move that telegraphs exactly what's on the table: chip export rules in exchange for whatever Xi is willing to give on rare earths, Taiwan posture, or tariffs. I think bringing Huang into the room blurs the line between US trade policy and Nvidia's China revenue plan in a way that...

Two men. Nine years. One play already written. This special-edition deep dive walks through the Trump–Xi relationship from the April 6, 2017 Mar-a-Lago chocolate-cake dinner — Trump telling Xi about *"fifty-nine missiles, all of which hit, by the way"* while Xi planted his feet and refused the handshake yank — through to the May 14, 2026 bilateral in Beijing. Pip and Bash, ~70 minutes, fully sourc...

Lead story: Bessent meets He Lifeng in Seoul this morning to pre-cook the Trump-Xi summit in Beijing later this week, and the makeup of the U.S. delegation tells you what the deal will look like. Boeing's Kelly Ortberg and Citi's Jane Fraser are flying with the President, alongside agribusiness reps. Aircraft orders, financial services access, and soybean purchases are the currency. Reuters and Bl...

And I'm Pip. Around four in the morning on February 6th, 2012, a man pulled his car into the parking lot of the United States Consulate in Chengdu, China. He had been driving for several hours. He was the police chief of Chongqing — a megacity of thirty-three million people, on the upper Yangtze, six hours by road from where he now sat. He went inside. He asked for asylum.

Beijing handed suspended death sentences to former defense ministers Li Shangfu and Wei Fenghe, with state media framing it as a loyalty purge inside the PLA. Two sitting-era defense chiefs convicted in the same week is unprecedented, and Xi is signaling that the Rocket Force and equipment procurement chains are still being cleaned out. Reuters and Xinhua have the official lines. https://www.reute...

Anthropic just locked up the entire Colossus 1 compute footprint at the SpaceX-xAI campus, and CEO Dario Amodei says the company wants gigawatts of orbital AI capacity as the next step. My read: this is a frontier lab betting that terrestrial power and cooling won't scale fast enough, and trying to corner both the largest existing cluster and the off-planet roadmap before competitors price it in....

Top of the brief: President Trump confirmed he considered ordering the US Navy to force open the Strait of Hormuz by military action during the recent Iran crisis, even as the ceasefire holds. The admission, made in remarks the White House didn't walk back, signals how close Washington came to a direct shooting confrontation with Iranian forces over shipping lanes carrying roughly a fifth of globa...