Loren King
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lorenking.org
Loren King
@lorenking.org
980 followers 770 following 480 posts
"Ain't all buttons and charts, little albatross"

Dad, professor, marathon swimmer.

Not nearly as smart as @kimdej.bsky.social

@[email protected]
www.lorenking.org
www.greatlakestrust.org
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lorenking.org
November 25, 2025 at 12:20 AM
lorenking.org
"The plan was negotiated by Steve Witkoff, a real-estate developer with no historical, geographical, or cultural knowledge of Russia or Ukraine, and Kirill Dmitriev, who heads Russia’s sovereign-wealth fund and spends most of his time making business deals."
Anne Applebaum in the Atlantic on the ridiculous US "Peace" proposal for Russia and Ukraine: "Why is the Trump White House pushing Ukraine to accept a Russian plan that paves the way for another war? The document offers some hints, declaring that the U.S. would also somehow take charge of the $100 billion in frozen Russian assets, for example, supposedly to invest this money in Ukraine and receive "50% of the profits from this venture." Europeans, whose banks actually hold most of these assets, would receive nothing. European taxpayers, who currently provide almost all of the military and humanitarian support to Ukraine, are nevertheless expected to contribute $100 billion to Ukraine's reconstruction." Anne Applebaum in the Atlantic on the ridiculous US "Peace" proposal for Russia and Ukraine: "For a decade, Russia has been seeking to divide Europe and America, to undermine NATO and weaken the transatlantic alliance. This peace plan, if accepted, will achieve that goal. There is a long tradition of great powers in Europe making deals over the heads of smaller countries, leading to terrible suffering. The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, with its secret protocols, brought us World War II. The Yalta agreement gave us the Cold War. The Witkoff-Dmitriev pact, if it holds, will fit right into that tradition."
November 22, 2025 at 4:22 PM
lorenking.org
"In any other administration, at any other time in American history, this level of corruption would be a political disaster — a scandal that could bring down the administration. For the Trump administration, it is a Tuesday."
There is no question that American politics has had its fair share of corrupt acts and corrupt people. But the office of the presidency in particular has never seen anything like the petty jobbery and open malfeasance of Trump and the people around him. All misdeeds are not the same, and there is a real difference between the unseemly revolving door between business and government — the plum position on a corporate board or an easy lobbying gig — and a new status quo in which business leaders and heads of state give the president actual tribute in order to put themselves in the good graces of the White House. When we look at authoritarian leaders abroad, we see a tight connection between autocratic governance and extreme graft. If the regimes of both Vladimir Putin in Russia and Viktor Orban in Hungary are models for Trump and his far-right allies in both ideological and practical terms, then it is worth observing the extent to which both men use their governments to siphon wealth from the public and hand it to small cadres of regime loyalists. Their obsession with national greatness — with ethnic chauvinism and so-called traditional values — is little more than a cover story for common thieves whose great aspiration is to steal and loot with abandon. And if corruption and authoritarianism are tied together — if they are two acts in the same story — then the struggle against Trump’s authoritarian designs must also be a struggle against his personal corruption as well as the corruption of the political system. “Just as good customs require laws in order to be maintained,” Machiavelli observed in his commentaries on the Roman historian Livy, “so laws require good customs in order to be observed.” When either laws or customs degrade, when the body politic begins to drift toward corruption, the only recourse — if the people hope to preserve a republic — is to build new institutions and with them new ways of political life.
November 19, 2025 at 1:37 PM
lorenking.org
Is MarathonSwimmingSky a thing yet? It is now! Here with Elliot Hasler for the Toronto screening of his wonderful #MaratjonSwimming biopic, #VindicationSwim !

vindicationswimfilm.com
November 14, 2025 at 11:35 PM
lorenking.org
November 9, 2025 at 2:07 AM
lorenking.org
While we're on the laudable theme of no kings no tyrants ...
Cover of James C Scott's Art of Not Being Governed (2009) Trey Menefee, Seeing Like a ‘Sea Gypsy’: An Anarchist History of Hong Kong (2013) add Arif Dirlik, Anarchism in the Chinese Revolution (1991)
October 18, 2025 at 7:28 PM
lorenking.org
True, but personally, I do have some training-related reasons for worrying about it, and finding safe plant-based sources ...
Somewhere in the English Channel
October 17, 2025 at 1:50 AM
lorenking.org
Taking out Beatrix for a quick harbour jaunt in light winds. Rolling furler still temperamental. #HamOnt #ThisOldBoat #Northern25
Sailing in Hamilton Harbour.
October 17, 2025 at 12:54 AM
lorenking.org
"if Mokyr’s work is right, then we aren’t going to have a strong economy if we let our colleges and universities go to seed."

I've long thought that related economic work on agglomeration and dynamic information externalities was really at root about the critical role of universities in innovation.
October 14, 2025 at 11:32 PM
lorenking.org
I'm a slave to Strava 🫣
October 14, 2025 at 1:01 PM
lorenking.org
Sure kid, whatever you say.
October 11, 2025 at 8:10 PM
lorenking.org
... yeah, because it's not like economists and epidemiologists have ever considered the complexities of causal inference. But you, menoarenoniceguy1.bsky.social, without reading the paper, have identified the simple yet critical logical flaw in their peer-reviewed analysis. 🙄
October 11, 2025 at 2:05 PM
lorenking.org
End times.
Aggressive California squirrel somehow sends to people to hospital, reported in the Guardian
September 24, 2025 at 7:02 PM
lorenking.org
It's insane that this is where we are, but alas. It's impossible not to marvel at what Nature recently described as "the staggering success of vaccines". Or it should be.
The staggering success of vaccines, by Tara Haelle, Nature Innovations
September 22, 2025 at 9:32 PM
lorenking.org
"That the Trump administration and the MAGA movement are less interested in deliberation and governance than they are in domination and obedience should shape and structure our sense of this political moment."
"Calls for dialogue and discussion — for greater rates of encounter between the professional left and the professional right — make sense when there’s consensus over the character of the overall political order. If we all agree that we are part of a contest of equals — if we take the political equality of all groups and peoples for granted — then we can discuss any number of issues across ideological lines without rancor and needless division. But if the aim of one faction is to dominate all the others — if the explicit goal is to curb the rights of its opponents and force them to submit to conditions of political inequality — then discussion is less useful than a willingness to defend liberal society in the face of tyranny and despotism."
September 21, 2025 at 1:16 PM
lorenking.org
"The fundamental issue with “debate me bro” culture isn’t just that it’s obnoxious, it’s that it creates a false equivalence between good-faith expertise and bad-faith trolling."
There are many problems with this statement, but Klein’s fundamental error reveals something much more dangerous: he’s mistaking performance for discourse, spectacle for persuasion. Kirk wasn’t showing up to campuses to “talk with anyone who would talk to him.” He was showing up armed with a string of logical fallacies, nonsense talking points, and gotcha questions specifically designed to enrage inexperienced college students so he could generate viral social media clips of himself “owning the libs.”
September 18, 2025 at 12:17 AM
lorenking.org
Money well spent, thanks @bsky.app
August 30, 2025 at 4:59 PM
lorenking.org
Philosophy folk: this isn't what it looks like.
August 30, 2025 at 1:53 PM
lorenking.org
I ask my students where their water comes from? the smart-ass answer is "the tap." Where their shit ends up? Awkward silence. #UrbanWater is the most critically under-appreciated dilemma we will face. Half of the planet's eight billion souls live in and around cities.

www.nature.com/articles/s41...
August 8, 2025 at 2:33 PM
lorenking.org
"We players are a rare species. And like any species ..."

Oh come on.
Ryan Gosling's character Jared Vennett in The Big Short (2015): "I never hung out with these idiots after work. Ever. I had fashion friends."
July 31, 2025 at 12:31 PM
lorenking.org
This, but upping the floof beast ante.
My two adorbs dogs, not yet submitted to We Rate Dogs.
July 19, 2025 at 9:52 AM
lorenking.org
I knew he'd be a technocrat, and I get that the Kafkaesque Trump idiocy dramatically constrains plausible options, but I worry that @mark-carney.bsky.social may be a quisling? Disappointing, to say the least. A propos of nothing in particular, I've been revisiting this book ...
July 18, 2025 at 12:40 PM
lorenking.org
You know, JD has been here with us here in Bluesky for a month now, but I'm starting to think he's saving all his banger posts for some other social media platform ... 🤔
July 18, 2025 at 11:20 AM
lorenking.org
"I do remember two questions I posed when we met. The first I had thought almost preposterous: Could he summarize the evolution of imperial Rome in a single sentence? He said he could do it in three words: “Fewer have more.” ..."

www.theatlantic.com/magazine/arc...
The idea of governments as public ventures with a public purpose and some degree of public voice—what the Mayflower Compact called a “civill Body Politick”—took a long time to claw its way back into existence. Most people in the developed world have been living in a civill Body Politick, or something that aspires to be one, for several centuries. I won’t overstate how successful this experiment has been, but it’s the reason we have police forces rather than vigilantes, and safety nets rather than alms thrown haphazardly from horseback by men in tights. Most of the scholars are profoundly wary: They foresee an erosion of transparency, a disregard for individual rights, and a concentration of power among an ever smaller group of wealthy barons, even as the bulk of the population is relegated to service jobs that amount to a modern form of serfdom. For their part, theorists on the techno-libertarian or neo-reactionary fringe, observing from egg chairs in the Sky Lounge, see all these same things, and can’t wait. As in medieval times, the affluent withdraw behind barriers. If it were built today, Windsor Castle would be described in the sales prospectus as a “privately governed residential community.” In the 1990s, when the economist Robert Reich began writing about “the secession of the successful,” some 3 million American housing units were lodged inside gated communities, which protected a population of about 8 million. Today, gated communities encompass 14 million housing units. On its website, a real-estate company in Florida earlier this year asked readers, “Is a Moat Right for You?” It was an April Fools’ joke, but not a very good one, because modern moated residences already exist. Perhaps the most exclusive gated community in the world is actually an island—Indian Creek Village, in Biscayne Bay, Florida, with 89 residents (including Jeff Bezos, Ivanka Trump, and Jared Kushner) and a perimeter-security radar system designed by the Israeli company Magos. Officers in speedboats intercept anyone venturing too close.
July 17, 2025 at 11:14 AM
lorenking.org
Your periodic reminder that Marc Andreessen is a deeply unserious person.
July 12, 2025 at 9:48 PM