iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Simon Lester @simonlester.com · 29/09/2026

Interesting details on how the Iowa steel deal got done. www.nytimes.com/2026/09/28/u...

Mesabi executives have leaned on a Trump-world insider as the company has sought to expand its footprint in the United States. The company hired Jason Miller, a longtime Trump adviser, as its lobbyist, paying him at least $240,000 through his company SHW Partners, according to lobbying disclosure records. The government of India also hired Mr. Miller’s company, paying $150,000 per month for “strategic counsel, tactical planning and government relations assistance on policy matters before the U.S. government,” according to federal filings under the Foreign Agent Registration Act.

Simon Lester @simonlester.com · 19/09/2026

"In [Kushner's] view, it is less important to know a region’s history or the details of the partisans’ negotiating positions than to simply hear the sides out and split the difference." www.newyorker.com/magazine/202... This approach dies not sound promising.

out. Kushner, who is forty-five, has little regard for the craft of diplomacy. In his view, it is less important to know a region’s history or the details of the partisans’ negotiating positions than to simply hear the sides out and split the difference. Peace deals are like real-estate deals, he has said. Both involve hard bargaining and, at times, bluffing. The fact that so many diplomats before him have struggled is a testament not to the intransigence of international problems but to the mediocrity of his predecessors.

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Simon Lester @simonlester.com · 16/09/2026

This blast from the past seems particularly relevant today.

"Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh, with the support of the Iranian parliament, nationalized the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company and created the National Iranian Oil Company. This action prompted a notorious joint UK-US plan, carried out in 1953, to destabilize the Mosaddegh government and restore Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi to power. The political repercussions in Iran were devastating to US interests. Anti-American outrage in Iran mounted, leading to the shah being overthrown in 1979, ushering in decades of hostility between the United States and Iran, and culminating in the Israeli-US war against Tehran this year."

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Simon Lester @simonlester.com · 16/09/2026

Here's the Canada part of the von der Leyen speech.

Mark, your presence here is a symbol of the enduring friendship between our people. Our cultural, historical and personal links run deep within the fabric of our societies.

And thanks to CETA, our trade in goods has grown by 75 % in less than a decade.

This shows the power of our trade agreements. We see the world with the same eyes: from AI to climate change, from the Arctic to geopolitics. And we have stood together: on Ukraine, on defence, on raw materials and on supply chains.

But above all, dear Mark, Europe and Canada believe in democracy.

We believe that power does not belong to the strongest, the richest or the loudest – but to all of us. That democracies have the freedom to choose with whom to work.

So, we are joining forces voluntarily. We will move from CETA to an Alliance for the Future to create a common prosperity and economic security space. We will work on intelligent manufacturing. We will create a tech alliance. We will integrate defence industrial bases. We will make the Arctic a flagship joint project. We will work on energy, critical minerals and batteries. On AI, quantum, cyber and economic security.

This is a partnership not against anyone else, but for our common strength.

In short, we want to bring the relationship with Canada to the highest level possible.

Dear Mark,

I said we must urgently reimagine our partnerships. So, I would like to work with you on opening the door for Canada to be the first associate member of the EU.

We share one ocean, one set of values, one way of seeing the world. And we will now build our shared future as well – thank you for being here.

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Simon Lester @simonlester.com · 29/08/2026

Thank goodness the US government was able to rescue Venezuela from socialism ... wait, who is going to own a majority share in the Venezuelan oil fields? OK, never mind.

"Sources with knowledge of the agreement tell The Economist that the “private business” that will hold a 45% stake in the new joint-venture operator (with the American government reportedly holding the rest via an office at the Pentagon)"

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Simon Lester @simonlester.com · 27/08/2026

This is quite a shift from sentence 1 to sentence 2.

"Parra said he is not a white supremacist because it goes against his religion and he has a Colombian father. “I do think that the white race contributes more to the world,” he said."

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Simon Lester @simonlester.com · 25/08/2026

When I highlight a Matt Stoller post here it's usually about racism, misogyny, etc., but today he weighed in on Canada issues and it was 😬

Mark Carney has got a lot of people fooled. He's a very dangerous autocrat, far worse than Trump.

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Simon Lester @simonlester.com · 19/08/2026

I had "a series of 30-day (or so) extensions" but got the basic idea right so I'll take it.

"In my view, what we may see is a series of 30-day (or so) extensions that keep the Section 338 tariffs hanging over the U.S.-Canada trade relationship for a while."

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Simon Lester @simonlester.com · 12/08/2026

Colby panicking a bit here about foreign governments shifting weapons purchases away from US industry. www.war.gov/News/Speeche...

Colby: "But it is to counsel rejecting the delusion of fashionable but superficial ideas like middle power alliances designed to exclude America. To be clear, we encourage collaboration among allies and partners as well as efforts to build up their defense industrial capacities as part of increased defense spending in line with the new global standard set by the 2025 Hague NATO Summit. But such efforts by our allies and close partners should integrate and be complementary with America's — not vainly and futilely seek to exclude or supplant us. The watchwords should be strategies of practicality, pragmatism, and realism, not the buzzword-deep strategies of international conferences."

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Simon Lester @simonlester.com · 12/08/2026

Matt Stoller is talking about race again and it's not pretty.

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Simon Lester @simonlester.com · 20/07/2026

(a fuller look at the passage)

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Simon Lester @simonlester.com · 20/07/2026

This is what CRS had to say on the issue (ignore the typo): www.congress.gov/crs_external...

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Simon Lester @simonlester.com · 20/07/2026

Seems like there's an effort underway to put the blame for Biden's foreign policy on Biden himself, rather than on the people who want to serve in a future Dem administration.

Blinken, who was sixty-one on October 7th, had worked at Biden’s side for decades, in the Senate and in the Obama White House. His position at the State Department put at his disposal the insights of the U.S. Foreign Service, which included seasoned diplomats who, unlike the circle around Biden, had spent years living in the Middle East. Sullivan, who was forty-six at the start of the conflict, was a former Rhodes Scholar and Supreme Court clerk who’d been at the center of the Democratic foreign-policy establishment for more than a decade. Yet, White House officials told me, Biden sometimes brusquely dismissed the views of both men, raising his voice as though berating children. (Biden, through a spokesperson, declined to speak with me.)

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Simon Lester @simonlester.com · 15/07/2026

They seem to be panicking about the possibility of lost US weapons export sales.

Colby claiming US won't lose weapons export sales

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Simon Lester @simonlester.com · 15/07/2026

Is the "upsurge in desire for engagement with the United States" in the room with you now?

Colby being delusional about foreign policy

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Simon Lester @simonlester.com · 13/07/2026

It doesn't seem possible to cut needed spending AND increase the US federal budget deficit, and yet here we are.

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Simon Lester @simonlester.com · 07/07/2026

Apparently only clairvoyant people could have predicted the Platner revelations of today, so congrats to everyone on here for being clairvoyant!

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Simon Lester @simonlester.com · 30/06/2026

More here: "the relevant principles ... must be faithfully applied not only to circumstances as they existed in 1787, 1791, and 1868, for example, but also to modern situations that were unknown or unanticipated by the Constitution’s Framers." Like maybe the gun situation?

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Simon Lester @simonlester.com · 30/06/2026

From Justice Kavanaugh: "significant illegal immigration into the United States is a new circumstance that was largely unknown as of 1868 and that the Framers of the Fourteenth Amendment could not have fully anticipated." OK, but could the framers of the 2nd amendment have anticipated modern guns?

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Simon Lester @simonlester.com · 17/06/2026

There's an effort underway to present Vance as an anti-hawk, but I think the internal GOP battle is really more about standard hawks like Vance versus über-hawks like Lindsey Graham. wapo.st/4eNWKo0

Vice President JD Vance has become the face of a temporary peace agreement designed to end an unpopular war against Iran that he was skeptical of entering to begin with — a position his allies maintain is a net positive politically, even as it puts him at odds with influential hawks within the GOP.

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Simon Lester @simonlester.com · 15/06/2026

Thank you random reddit user for articulating what I've been thinking

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Simon Lester @simonlester.com · 06/06/2026

I am skeptical that left, right, D and R all want the same things.

"WTF timeline are we on. Someone called me the MAGA whisperer and I’ll gladly take the title. Left, right, D or R we all want the same things. We’re being divided on purpose by the Epstein Elite Oligarch class because as long as we’re at each other’s throats, they get fat and rich off of our misery. The second we figure out we agree on more than we disagree, they’re done. Love your neighbor. Be yourself. Radical honesty. No fucks given, no fucks taken. Everything else is just noise. (But still fuck Jake “Brick Tamland” Tapper on any time line)"

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Simon Lester @simonlester.com · 03/06/2026

Which economies get 10% and which get 12.5% under USTR's proposed Section 301 tariffs related to forced labor imports? The Federal Register notice breaks it down: ustr.gov/sites/defaul...

For economies that impose a forced labor import prohibition—Canada, Ecuador,
the European Union, Indonesia, Mexico, and Pakistan; for economies that have
undertaken commitments in their respective Agreements on Reciprocal Trade regarding
forced labor import prohibitions—Argentina, Bangladesh, Cambodia, Ecuador, El
Salvador, Guatemala, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Taiwan; and economies that have
imposed a partial regime with the effect of preventing the importation of certain forced
labor goods—the United Kingdom; the Trade Representative proposes additional duties
of 10% for products of these economies. For all other economies that have failed to
impose and effectively enforce a forced labor import prohibition, the Trade
Representative proposes 12.5% as the rate of additional duties.

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Simon Lester @simonlester.com · 31/05/2026

I know there's a lot to be outraged about, but a refugee policy that is almost exclusively for white people should be an above the fold headline in every major paper every day. www.economist.com/united-state...

"The refugees Donald Trump wants are white and middle-class
Afrikaners are welcome. Pretty much no one else is"

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Simon Lester @simonlester.com · 30/05/2026

The actual Pew survey data on which this article is based is not exactly reassuring, but is perhaps as not as bad as the headline makes it sound.

data on Americans' views of the causes of climate change

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Simon Lester @simonlester.com · 22/05/2026

I repeat, what on earth is going on

“Your audience absolutely trusts you,” an emotional Mr. Biden said. “And the reason that they trust you is because you’ve shown an enormous amount of courage of speaking your mind.”

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Simon Lester @simonlester.com · 18/05/2026

It's the official start of my "fantasizing about moving to Canada" season

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Simon Lester @simonlester.com · 15/05/2026

Just arrived in the mail. Can't wait to read it, and then start and win a trade war!

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Simon Lester @simonlester.com · 10/05/2026

This quote at the end was kind of funny though.

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Simon Lester @simonlester.com · 09/05/2026

It hadn't been totally clear to me if @wsocial.eu was being built on the AT Protocol, but this seems definitive.

How is W built?
W is built on the open AT-Protocol, a global standard for interoperable social networking. This allows your posts and content to work across apps, rather than being locked into a single platform.

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Simon Lester @simonlester.com · 30/04/2026

(To get a bit more technical, USTR is running things, but there's an interagency process)

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Simon Lester @simonlester.com · 20/04/2026

I'm skeptical of many of @linamkhan.bsky.social's antitrust views, but I would like to see her posting on Bluesky. Would be a good way to take on corporate power.

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Simon Lester @simonlester.com · 05/04/2026

I missed the "neoliberalism" debate last night, but highlighted below is a question I once asked. The problem I see is that no one is defining the term in a way that makes it easy to figure out who falls into the category.

There is a lot of space between complete socialism and a pure free market, and the vast majority of people are somewhere in that space. Are they all neoliberals? What level of support for markets justifies the use of that term?

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Simon Lester @simonlester.com · 30/03/2026

This Newsom response on Cuba was quite the word salad.

We’ve been trying to do that for [nearly] 70 years. Dumb as we want to be, continue to do what you’ve done, you’ll get what you got. I appreciate, in one respect, that the Trump administration is sort of approaching things because of an opportunistic situation regarding Venezuela. This quasi-blockade has created conditions where now we have 51 prisoners that have been released, that we’re having a different conversation with the leadership, that we’re negotiating a different framework from a different position of strength. So I appreciate and admire at least a willingness to iterate. But look, you talk about a dictatorship, right? You’re talking about Maduro. No love lost for Maduro. You’re talking about a dictatorship, you’re talking about the leadership in Cuba today. So pursuing those values, absolutely,

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Simon Lester @simonlester.com · 25/03/2026

Spanberger has been too extreme according to ... Jill Biden's former spokesman? Congrats on successfully digging so deep to find a Dem to criticize her!

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Simon Lester @simonlester.com · 22/03/2026

There's an effort in the media to present Tucker Carlson (and various others) as "anti-war," but when you read the full details it always turns out they just want to focus US foreign policy on China, so even if they object to wars A or B, I'm not sure "anti-war" is the right term here.

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Simon Lester @simonlester.com · 22/03/2026

I'm interpreting this @economist.com headline to mean they think economists themselves should engage in sex work and I'm not going to read the article to find out anything different.

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Simon Lester @simonlester.com · 21/03/2026

Thinking back on when Matt Stoller believed the Trump administration would be a tough antitrust enforcer. 🙃

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Simon Lester @simonlester.com · 19/03/2026

I'm no more a Douthat fan than anyone else on here, but I did appreciate "What do you mean by 'visual differences'? Clothes?" as a way to tease out the racism. Nicely done.

Carl: Yeah. Having said that, I think that there are a few differences. One is that the obvious visual differences in many groups that are coming over create more challenges to assimilation. Now, we have a growing multiethnic group, and I think that’s going to be an important part of this new American ethnicity that we’re creating.

Douthat: What do you mean by “visual differences”? Clothes? Or —

Carl: Meaning people look different. If I am from Ireland and I go and I marry some old stock English person, my kids are not necessarily going to look different in an obvious way. Whereas it’s more of a challenge when you have what Canada would call “visible minorities” now — with all the demographic changes in Canada, that may be an outdated term at some point. But I think that matters.

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Simon Lester @simonlester.com · 16/03/2026

I found this Yglesias piece to have nothing of value in it, but of particularly no value was the assessment that Trump made the GOP more moderate.

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Simon Lester @simonlester.com · 07/03/2026

A letter to the WaPo raises the specter of a German language Super Bowl halftime show [very big eyeroll emoji]

Marc A. Thiessen was right that people let their politics dominate their reactions to things. As Andrew Van Dam reported in his Dec. 15, 2024, Department of Data column, “A census shake-up challenges our perception of Americans’ origins,” the most common ancestry in America is German. What if next year’s Super Bowl halftime show were exclusively in German? You would see the same people who supported this year’s all-Spanish show freaking out.

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Simon Lester @simonlester.com · 05/03/2026

This is a short summary I did of the key points.

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