Politico, a Voice of the Crust.

Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-Fla.) is still searching for a cover-up in the assassination of former President John F. Kennedy Jr. — asserting without evidence that an allegedly previously unreleased video could reveal new details of the president’s death, despite the recent declassification of reams of government files on the killing.

In an interview with Fox News on Friday, Luna said that she had just been told that NBC has a “never been seen before” video of the shooting that she would be requesting access to. The video, according to Luna, “allegedly” shows famed gunman Lee Harvey Oswald near Kennedy’s vehicle when the assassination happened.

Would that be the case, “he couldn’t have been the shooter,” Luna told Fox host Jesse Watters.

I love the smell of conspiracy in the morning.

As we all know, Oswald was in the 4th floor break room in the Texas Schoolbook Depository when the shooting took place.

Paul Graham.

What should one do? That may seem a strange question, but it’s not meaningless or unanswerable. It’s the sort of question kids ask before they learn not to ask big questions. I only came across it myself in the process of investigating something else. But once I did, I thought I should at least try to answer it.

So what should one do? One should help people, and take care of the world. Those two are obvious. But is there anything else? When I ask that, the answer that pops up is Make good new things.

I can’t prove that one should do this, any more than I can prove that one should help people or take care of the world. We’re talking about first principles here. But I can explain why this principle makes sense. The most impressive thing humans can do is to think. It may be the most impressive thing that can be done. And the best kind of thinking, or more precisely the best proof that one has thought well, is to make good new things.

Melanie Israel from The Daily Signal.

A new report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention about birth data for 2023 is out. For everyone concerned about the long-term decline in America’s birth rate, the report doesn’t show strong signs that much has changed

A cultural change brought about the ‘birth dearth’, and a cultural change will be needed to reverse it. Good luck with that, fringe magazine.

Why should we care about declining birth rates, and what’s driving the trend? As a recent Heritage Foundation report warns, U.S. fertility is now below replacement. Fewer births and our historic low fertility rate will affect the future economy. It will affect programs like Social Security. Don’t forget the military. What about caregiving as the elderly age? A declining population will affect our nation’s future in more ways than we can count.

I would argue that, with automation increasingly replacing lower level human workers with machines, we ought to welcome the fact that our population is shrinking, since that reduces the problem of a surplus of unemployed underclass people who wind up turning to crime, such as robbery and drug-dealing, to live. Social Security is a political problem–it’s basically a big Ponzi scheme–and it will require a political solution (which I don’t expect to happen until it crashes). And the military part of the automation revolution as well, and will gradually shift over being more machines and fewer people. More births is not the solution to every problem.

If you ask 10 people why the number of births keeps going down, you’ll probably get 10 different answers, from housing and child care costs to economic anxiety to student loan debt. While there’s not one sole reason (and therefore not one single policy solution,) at the heart of the issue is marriage—fewer marriages, specifically.

The link between marriage and birth-rate is not that strong. We have plenty of births outside of wedlock in the U.S. (40.5%), and we’re not even in the top ten for number of out-of-marriage births. Marriage no longer has much to do with it. (This has more to do with the agenda of The Daily Signal people to promote marriage rather than any realistic attempt to figure out what the actual cause might be.)

There are three elephants in the room that the chattering class are ignoring:

1. hormonal birth control
2. feminism
3. social media

How these inter-relate and are causing the current situation would take many books to explain, and indeed they have:

Dr. David M. Buss, The Evolution of Desire: Strategies in Human Mating
Dr. David M. Buss, Why Women Have Sex: Understanding Sexual Motivations from Adventure to Revenge (and Everything in Between)
Rollo Tomassi, The Rational Male (part of a series of five books, the sixth is in preparation)

These people need to do some honest research and look at the facts objectively rather than through the distortion field of a preconceived ideology. As Mulder liked to say, the truth is out there.

Read it.

Texas administered 15,000 more measles vaccinations this year compared to 2024—and now there’s a growing measles outbreak that has surpassed the total number of cases reported across the entire United States last year.

The news follows this website’s February report that measles cases in Gaines County, Texas, had jumped 242% following a health district campaign to hand out free measles vaccines.

A measles outbreak after higher vaccination rates in Texas calls into question the shot’s claimed effectiveness and underlying design.

I used to get a flu shot every year until I realized that the only times I got the flu was after getting the flue shot, so I quit doing that, and haven’t had the flu since.

Political Psychology.

While the psychological dispositions that underlie conspiracy thinking are well researched, there has been remarkably little research on the political preferences of conspiracy believers that go beyond self-reported ideology or single political issue dimensions. Using data from the European Voter Election Study (EVES), the relationship between conspiracy thinking and attitudes on three deeper-lying and salient political dimensions (redistribution, authoritarianism, migration) is examined. The results show a clear picture: Individuals with economically left-wing and culturally conservative attitudes tend to score highest on conspiracy thinking. People at this ideological location seem to long for both economic and cultural protection and bemoan a “lost paradise” where equalities had not yet been destroyed by “perfidious” processes of cultural modernization and economic neoliberalism. This pattern is found across all countries and holds regardless of socioeconomic characteristics such as education and income. While previous research has found that belief in conspiracies tends to cluster at the extremes of the political spectrum, our analysis opens up a more complex picture, showing that conspiracy thinking is not merely related to extremist orientations, but to specific combinations of political attitudes.

Read it.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that….

According to a well-known proverb, patience is a virtue. According to a recent study in the Personality and Social Psychology Review, though, it’s actually a coping mechanism that we employ to stop everyday frustrations from getting on top of us.

Kate Sweeny at the University of California Riverse and colleagues ran three studies to explore aspects of a theory that she has devised, called the process model of patience. This theory holds that impatience is (like anger or happiness, for example) its own emotion, triggered when an unwanted situation, such as being stuck in traffic or standing in line at a till, is taking longer to resolve than seems reasonable. Through this lens, patience serves as a form of emotion regulation that helps us to deal with that unpleasant emotional state.

In these studies, conducted on a total of about 1,400 people, the participants read hypothetical scenarios that described a range of undesirable everyday situations, some of which featured an ‘objectionable delay’. They were then asked about how impatient they would feel in that situation, how patiently they would respond to it, and their general perceptions of the scenario..

Emotions are built-in reactions to events provided to us by evolution, both physical and social. Sometimes those emotions are appropriate to the event, sometimes (in a modern technological society) they are not. The ability to suppress the effects of emotional responses in favor of using the brain to think through a situation is the primary characteristic that distinguishes us from other animals, and the foundation of what we commonly consider ‘adult behavior’. Patience may not formally be a virtue, but it is virtue in action.

ZMan’s weekly podcast. Highly recommended.

One of the greatest tricks Americans have ever pulled is convincing themselves and the world that we are not ideologues. At worst, we are the defenders of Western liberalism, which is never described as an ideology. Unlike communism or fascism, it is seen as a set of obvious conclusions arrived at through reason. If anything, the American way is considered a practical antidote to the problems of ideology.

This has always been nonsense, but we have believed it for so long that no one thinks much about it anymore. The closest we get are critiques of liberalism from neo-traditionalists, as if we still live in a liberal age. In reality, America is an ideological state and has been for a long time. The ideology has evolved to suit the times, but the core features have remained unchanged since the 19th century.

This is one reason for the current crisis. The age of ideology is coming to a close, but the United States, especially its ruling class, remains trapped in the age of ideology—like a dinosaur stuck in a tar pit. While other major powers think and talk in practical terms about practical problems, the United States continues to think and talk in explicitly moral terms about abstract concepts.

Trudeau must be on ‘coast’ — he’s re-running cartoons from thirty years ago (except for Sunday, when he bashes Trump).

The New York Times, a Voice of the Crust.

Ponder in your own mind to what extent somebody writing for the NYT will actually have a clue as to ‘why young people voted’ one way or another.

The most striking feature of the young adult Trump swing is that it occurred even though there has been no significant recent increase in the proportion of young adults who identify as conservative. Data from the Cooperative Election Study, a national survey with more than 50,000 respondents during election years, show that between 2006 and 2023, about 23 percent of Americans ages 18 to 29 identified as either “conservative” or “very conservative” on average, a number that fluctuated only modestly year to year. The 2024 numbers, which the study’s researchers have shared with me, show no meaningful departure from this pattern. (Despite fears of the influence of a misogynistic online “manosphere,” the ratio of young men to young women who identify as conservative did not change appreciably, either.)

Likewise, the survey registered only modest changes in the political party affiliations of young adults over the past two decades. Young people have been softening in their commitment to the Democrats, but they’ve been softening in their commitment to the Republicans as well. In place of these loyalties a growing number say they are independents.

Read it.

Also referred to as an “Iron Dome,” a Golden Dome is a pretty awesome rebranding of the current Israeli missile defense system and a new initiative to protect the US from missile and hypersonic attack. President Trump is right—we absolutely want one, and it is finally possible.

Ballistic missiles are the weapons of choice for our adversaries to strike the U.S. homeland from far away. Our most sophisticated adversaries are also developing the dreaded maneuvering hypersonic weapon which is capable of defeating today’s missile defenses.

A ballistic missile would arrive in minutes, be hard to see, and come in blisteringly fast. That’s because they are launched with rockets, the fasted delivery systems on earth, making this threat really tough to counter. Enter the missile defense interceptor.

Read it.

Federal officials are targeting a long-running underground birth tourism industry in California, where Chinese nationals pay baby brokers to ensure their children are born as U.S. citizens.

Authorities say pregnant women are often housed in upscale homes and apartments near Los Angeles—dubbed “baby farms” by locals. These illegal operations can charge over $100,000 per pregnancy, according to NewsNation.

“This was an industry,” said Acting U.S. Attorney Joseph McNally. “These were criminal enterprises that operated here in the United States and also people in China who would recruit. The organizers… were responsible for the birth tourism of thousands of babies. They had a system in place.”

McNally estimates that roughly 30,000 babies were born through these schemes.

A natural and predictable result of the flawed ‘everybody born here is a citizen’ system.

Personally, I don’t have a problem with it. These aren’t poor campesinos trying to hitch a ride on the American Welfare State. Nobody worries about Chinese (or Korean or Japanese or Indian) people moving into their neighborhoot.

John Derbyshire once said that there was nothin wrong with New York City that about a million ethnic Chinese wouldn’t fix, and he knows more about such things than I do. If Chinese immigrants want to turn California into another Singapore or Hong Kong, I can’t see that as a bad thing.

Read it.

Two Researchers from Italy and Scotland claim to have discovered a sprawling underground city beneath the pyramids in Egypt.

The Daily Mail reports that the researchers say they’ve found eight vertical cylinder-shaped structures extending more than 2,100 feet below the pyramid and more unknown structures 4,000 feet deeper.

Corrado Malanga, from Italy’s University of Pisa, and Filippo Biondi with the University of Strathclyde in Scotland Say they used radar pulses to create high-resolution images deep into the ground beneath the three Pyramids and observed massive structures 10 times larger than the pyramids themselves.

That would be cool–if it actually exists.

Financial Times, a Voice of the Crust.

The world looks different from the North Pole. Most maps chart the planet from east to west. But look at the world from the top down, and you suddenly see America’s relative position anew. Russia dominates the region. Greenland suddenly seems important, as does Canada. China, a “near-Arctic” nation, is a bit too close for comfort. The US, by comparison, is small. Alaska, its biggest state by territory, is a fraction of the view.

That world view is at the centre of the Trump administration’s new goal to “make shipbuilding great again”, courtesy of an upcoming executive order (which may drop as early as this week). This lays out the most ambitious industrial strategy in the shipbuilding sector since the Americans turned out 2,710 “liberty ships” in the space of four years during the second world war.

It will also be a topic at Monday’s Office of the US Trade Representative hearings on proposed remedies to combat China’s ringfencing of the global maritime, logistics and shipbuilding sectors.

The Financial Times is the UK equivalent of the Wall Street Journal–if the WSJ were run by the staff of Mother Jones.

Read it.

Is “Abundance” Creflo Dollar’s latest book? A follow-up to his volume on The Holy Spirit, Your Financial Advisor?

Nope. The author isn’t the televangelist, preaching a prosperity gospel. The writers are two libs: New York Times columnist Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson of The Atlantic.

The duo offers a simultaneous critique and path forward for Dems coming off their 2024 defeat. The notion is that over-regulation by liberal administrations has stifled growth and wealth, and that by reducing regulatory barriers, there’d be “abundance” ahead for all.

There’s only one little problem. The lefties hate anything pro-growth or pro-wealth. You might as well ask a vegan to go on an all-ribeye diet. Try convincing those folks that the path forward is to make life easier for . . . the oligarchs!

Scott Adams says that the book boils down to ‘Democrats need to become Republicans in fact if not in name’.

Preach it, brother.

Scott Adams: “One of the things that Trump brings to the party is that you never know what he’s gonna do.”

Popular mythology to the contrary notwithstanding, ‘reform’ does not mean ‘improve’.

Nor does it mean ‘correct’ or ‘fix’ or ‘put right’.

All it means is ‘change’, and change can be bad or good.

That’s all it means.

Follow the money.

Read it.

Pretty much every day, another customer clutching an old typewriter will walk into Mike Marr’s shop in Pawtucket, Rhode Island. Marr carefully looks the machine over. Invariably, it will be a total mess. Made decades ago, the hunk of heavy metal bristling with moving parts is now laced with years of grime. The keys are too stiff. Or maybe the paper that’s supposed to glide through it keeps getting stuck.

“Do you think you can get it going again?” the customer will ask, a touch of anxiety in their voice. Marr, who has been repairing typewriters for more than 20 years, will say he’ll give it his best shot.

“When they come in and pick that typewriter up, just seeing their smile is everything to us,” he says. Even in the year 2025, a century and a half after the first commercially successful typewriter was introduced to the American public, surprising numbers of people in the US are still using these machines. And not just for fun – many of Marr’s customers are businesses. “We’re still servicing probably 20 to 25 typewriters a week,” he says. He employs three other people in his shop to keep up with the demand. “Isn’t that crazy?”

…

It’s very hard to hack a typewriter since they are not connected to the internet.

Sometimes the old ways are best.

Read it.

Found throughout the British Isles under corner shop heat lamps and behind service station windows, the jumbo breakfast roll occupies an important place in the contemporary zeitgeist, a steadfast sentinel unmoving throughout this changing world. Cheap, ultra-processed, and unhealthy, viewed by an outsider this humble food might be regarded as little more than a culinary cry for help. But that is missing the point.

Immortalised by the Irish comedian Pat Shortt in his surprisingly catchy 2006 number one hit of the same name (yes, really), the jumbo breakfast roll is defined as including two eggs, two sausages, four pieces of bacon, and one piece each of black and white pudding, squashed into a bread roll, often with sauce, butter, or both. While ingredients vary from place to place and the precise name of such provisions can differ, the sentiment of this sandwich is the same everywhere. It exists to provide answers when you do not have enough energy left to ask any questions.

When you find yourself trundling into a fuel forecourt after a four hour drive, a far-cry from the Gloucester services, you can count on one thing to be there. When you have an unexpected meeting right when you were planning to take lunch, you can’t waste time waiting for your meal to be cooked fresh. It is both nostalgic and fulfilling, reliable and constant yet easily customisable. Like a bridge over troubled water, the jumbo breakfast roll is there for you in your weakest and weariest moments.

Read it.

At their most basic, seed oils are extracted from seeds. This might seem harmless—after all, olive oil comes from olives, and coconut oil from coconuts.

But not all seed oils are the same. Some, like sesame and flaxseed oil, have been integral to traditional diets for centuries and are extracted through natural, cold-press methods that preserve their nutrients and antioxidants.

Others, however, are highly processed. Industrial seed oils—like soybean, corn, canola, sunflower, safflower, cottonseed, grapeseed, and rice bran—are mass-produced through high-heat extraction and chemical refining.

Manufacturers frequently use solvents like hexane to extract the maximum amount of oil. These oils are refined, bleached, and deodorized, earning them the label “RBD” oils. This process makes them neutral in taste and more shelf-stable, but it also removes beneficial compounds like vitamin E and antioxidants.

Many industrial seed oils were never intended for human consumption. Canola oil began as rapeseed oil, primarily used as a machine lubricant until Canadian scientists modified it in the 1970s to remove toxic compounds. The name itself—a blend of “Canada” and “oil”—was a marketing invention. “Vegetable oil” is another misleading term—it’s often a blend of industrial seed oils marketed to sound healthier than it is.

Read it.

You’re cutting yourself a single slice of cake. You grab a butter knife out of the drawer, hack off a moist wedge, and munch away to your mouth’s delight. The next day, you’re cutting forty slices of cake for the whole office. You grab a large chef’s knife, warm it with hot water, and cube out the sheet cake without causing too much trauma to the icing. Next week, you’re starting at your cousin’s bakery. You’re supposed to cut a few thousand slices of cake, week in, week out. You suspect your haggardly knifework won’t do.

In the home kitchen, any old knife will do the job when it comes to slicing cakes, pies, and pastries. When it comes to commercial kitchens, though, presentation is everything and perfection is the bare minimum. Thankfully, there’s a better grade of cutting tool out there—and it’s more high tech than you might think.

Read it.

So, for a society to survive and thrive, it needs to reward its agents when they do things that help in its preservation and growth. This reward comes in the form of social approval. You invent something new, the society benefits and in returns showers you with the dopamine hit of public applause.

So far, so good. Nothing wrong with a mutually beneficial exchange. You do something good for the society and the society gives something back to you which feels great.

EXCEPT THIS BASICALLY NEVER HAPPENS

…

Social approval exists to attract participants in a game that ultimately benefits the collective at the expense of an individual.

Read it.

In a startling exposé, Lachlan Phillips, a former member of Extinction Rebellion (XR), has lifted the lid on what he claims are the true motives behind the climate activist group. Phillips, who spent several years with the organisation and produced over 60 videos for their campaigns, has revealed that XR’s agenda is not about saving the planet but about controlling the population and inciting a Communist revolution.

Read it.

Even the most opinionated become circumspect when the discussion turns to The Addiction Economy, for the term The Addiction Economy calls things by their real name, which disrupts our protective shield of denial.

Yes, denial, for ours is an Economy of Denial, where the surface stability of normalcy demands we avoid calling things by their real name at all costs, for that lays bare the core mechanisms of the Economy of Denial: addiction, extortion, deception. This is a jarring, disturbing mirror, for we see our own reflection.

We become quiet when The Addiction Economy comes up, for the core concept here is that highly profitable addictions have been normalized to the degree that the majority of the populace is addicted but doesn’t identify their addiction as an addiction because the words addiction and extortion have such negative connotations that they threaten both our sense of normalcy (i.e. belonging to the safe, stable, acceptable majority) and our self-pride that we’re far above the poor lost souls who succumb to addiction.

We have the technology.

Read it.

The degree to which Musk derangement has taken hold among Democrats is fascinating. It wasn’t too long ago that Barack Obama was regularly praising Tesla for saving the environment and creating American jobs. Maybe all the hysterical shrieking about climate change wasn’t entirely genuine. Sen. Mark Kelly (D., Ariz.) recently ditched his clean-driving Tesla because it was “built and designed by an a–hole.” He traded it in for a Chevy Tahoe SUV that gets about 15 miles per gallon. Lincoln Project cofounder Rick Wilson was temporarily banned from X, which Musk also owns, for encouraging deranged leftists to “attack” and “kill” Tesla, which he breathlessly described as “a bank for fascists, a goose-stepping hedge fund bankrolling the political fever dreams of Elon Musk and his DOGE dreams of controlling the ruins of the American government.” The Lincoln Project sent out a fundraising appeal minutes later

Read it.

The drones these shotguns are being used to defend against are most often cheap and fragile. Sure, even cheap quadcopter-style drones are faster than a foot soldier and faster than most military ground vehicles, but at 30 to 46 mph they fly at the same speed, or slower than many game birds. A good example of a widely used commercial drone that is regularly weaponized is the $3,000 DJI Mavic 3. It weighs just under two pounds and has a no-load (no weapon) max level flight speed of 46 mph with a max flight time of 41 minutes. That means it is slower than a duck, a pigeon, quail, pheasant, or even a turkey. And when weighed down with an explosive device it is even slower, and its endurance and range greatly reduced.

Note that these are all Turd World cities, not the Usual Suspects perennially castigated in then Narrative Media such as America, Europe, and China.

Steve Graham: “No one ever starts to worry when whites, Japanese, Koreans, and Chinese move in next door.”

The Guardian, a Voice of the Crust.

After long nights spent on problem sets, the most aimless and ambitious of us will forgo grad school and become interns and employees at the shiniest, slimiest corporations in America – big banks, the military industrial complex, big tech, big pharma – where we will solve interesting, difficult problems on cushy salaries.

Working at the “department of government efficiency” (Doge) seems to require the same skillset. Fueled by unbridled techno-optimism and edgy cultural capital, Doge seems less like a government agency and more like another one of Elon Musk’s shaky startups. While bewildered pundits including Fareed Zakaria struggle to diagnose and process the new technocracy in DC, our new Doge overlords are infinitely familiar to my classmates and me: they might as well be guys we knew from school.

This is the new generation of young technocrats who helped lift Trump into office: they are the crypto-obsessed love-children of Musk and Donald Trump, of Silicon Valley and the Heritage Foundation, of “effective altruism” and “effective accelerationism”. Meanwhile, graduates who lean left are simply out of luck: outside of academia, it can feel nearly impossible to find a progressive job in tech. Progressive Data Jobs, a major hub for jobs in this space, currently lists 96 open positions across all experience levels. By contrast, the careers portal at Goldman Sachs alone boasts 1,943 open jobs

The basic problem appears to be that proglodytes concentrate on spending other people’s money rather than on making money that can then be spent, which means that proglodyte organizations are dependent on ‘funding’ (other people giving you money for you to spend without any profitable result), which means that the jobs are always going to be more plentiful in organizations devoted to making money than organizations devoted to just spending money. Proglodytes are basically beggars (or thieves) rather than makers.

Read it.

A House GOP lawmaker has filed impeachment articles against the federal judge who ordered the Trump administration to stop deportation flights being conducted under the Alien Enemies Act.

“For the past several weeks, we’ve seen several rogue activist judges try to impede the president from exercising, not only the mandate voters gave him, but his democratic and constitutional authority to keep the American people safe,” Rep. Brandon Gill, R-Texas, told Fox News Digital. “This is another example of a rogue judge overstepping his…authority.”

Gill’s resolution, first obtained by Fox News Digital, accused U.S. District Court Judge James Boasberg of abusing his power in levying an emergency pause on the Trump administration’s plans to deport illegal immigrants under a wartime authority first issued in 1798, which President Donald Trump recently invoked to get members of the criminal Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua out of the U.S.

“Chief Judge Boasberg required President Trump to turn around planes midair that had aliens associated with Tren De Aragua, a designated Foreign Terrorist Organization,” the resolution said. “This conduct jeopardizes the safety of the nation, represents an abuse of judicial power, and is detrimental to the orderly functioning of the judiciary. Using the powers of his office, Chief Judge Boasberg has attempted to seize power from the Executive Branch and interfere with the will of the American people.”

The Telegraph (UK).

Immediately followed by all the French ‘super-rich’ moving elsewhere.

Europe is desperately scrambling for ways to fund greater defence spending as Donald Trump brings the era of US military dominance on the Continent to an acrimonious end.

Estonia has stripped its pensioners of valuable tax reliefs and imposed a 2pc “defence tax” on all its citizens – but France has floated perhaps the most radical solution yet.

Finance minister, Eric Lombard, last week opened the door to taxing just the country’s super-rich to fund France’s military build-up.

France is facing a unique quandary – it plans to boost its defence budget by €3bn (£2.5bn) a year until 2030 while managing an eye-watering national debt of €3.3 trillion.

ZMan peers behind the curtain.

Prior to the start of the Ukraine war, it was assumed that the Russians, if they desired, could quickly smash the Ukrainian army. Russia is a big country with a big army and Ukraine is not as big, but few understood that it had a big army. At the start of the war, it had an army of 350,000, with a similar number in reserve. Fewer anticipated the hundreds of billions in NATO weapons and money. Everyone, including the Russians, expected a short war, but instead it is a long war.

One main reason for this is technology. The Russians badly miscalculated how the war would unfold, but they also failed to adapt to new technology, specifically the use of drones in frontline battles. Their first taste of drone warfare was the Bayraktar TB2 drones supplied by the Turks to the Ukrainians. This is a medium-altitude long-endurance vehicle that allowed the Ukrainians to precisely aim their artillery at Russian formations, as well as directly attack those formations.

The Russians have proven to be quick learners. They rushed to embrace the new technology and have now taken it in directions few anticipated. First person video drones are now the primary weapon in the Russian arsenal, used to not only attack Ukrainian men and material, but used to shape the battlefield. This new use of drones came to the fore in the Ukrainian Kursk offensive, which concluded last week with a stunning Ukrainian defeat.

Sometimes the old ways are best,

The American Mind.

The Supreme Court’s ruling in Kelo v. City of New London is undoubtedly one of its worst decisions in the past 20 years. The Court gave state and local governments the option to transfer private property from its rightful owner to another private owner, justifying this as a “public use” since it will supposedly promote “economic development.” Kelo is a classic example of activist judges rationalizing a predetermined result—in this case, overturning the Constitution’s protection of private property rights.

The Court’s decision stripped Susette Kelo and her neighbors in the historic Fort Trumbull neighborhood of their property in order to build an “urban village”—a fact Justice John Paul Stevens breezily dismisses in his opinion, which is a thoroughly unimpressive piece of legal legerdemain. Stevens failed to note that the neighborhood would be bulldozed even though he acknowledged that not only had Kelo lived in her house since 1997, and had made substantial improvements to her property, but that “Wilhelmina Dery was born in her Fort Trumbull house in 1918 and has lived there her entire life.” The continued existence of what was apparently a very stable residential area, however, could not be allowed to stand in the way of “progress.” Stevens held that the residents and their homes must be sacrificed in the interest of a supposed greater good.

The thousands of new jobs and millions of dollars in new tax revenue that were promised, however, never materialized. Instead, an extremely expensive vacant lot now sits where the neighborhood once stood. The City of New London even tried to charge the former residents for five years of back rent as punishment for having contested what was essentially nothing but municipal extortion for the benefit of Pfizer.

Quillette.

As the world transitions from a values-based international order to a transactional, multipolar framework, Western militaries outside the US are going to have to rearm rapidly following the withdrawal of US security guarantees. While the military lessons from Ukraine have been widely discussed, those from Israel’s 7 October war have largely been overlooked. The Israel Defence Forces (IDF) have faced intense scrutiny and a steep learning curve since Hamas launched its surprise attack on 7 October 2023. During the punishing months of fierce urban combat in Gaza, the IDF made significant military advancements but also encountered critical challenges.

Gaza’s densely populated neighbourhoods and Hamas’s guerrilla militias are, respectively, very different from Eastern Europe’s open plains and Russia’s armed forces. Nevertheless, Western commanders can draw a number of important lessons from the IDF’s successes and setbacks that may be useful to future operations on Europe’s eastern flank and further afield. From drone warfare and the use of armour to urban command-and-control and civilian protection, Israel’s experience in Gaza provides a sobering preview of what high-intensity urban warfare can entail, and how modern militaries must evolve to achieve decisive and ethical victories in any future conflict.

Watch it.

I love Bob Hope. Sure, it’s glib, but it’s true.

“I don’t belong to an organized political party. I’m a Democrat.” — Will Rogers

Office of the Reviser of Statutes, Minnesota Legislature.

A bill for an act relating to mental health; modifying the definition of mental illness; adding a
definition for Trump Derangement Syndrome; amending Minnesota Statutes 2024,
sections 245.462, subdivision 20, by adding a subdivision; 245I.02, subdivision
29, by adding a subdivision.

…

Sec. 2. Minnesota Statutes 2024, section 245.462, is amended by adding a subdivision to
read:
Subd. 28. Trump Derangement Syndrome. “Trump Derangement Syndrome” means
the acute onset of paranoia in otherwise normal persons that is in reaction to the policies
and presidencies of President Donald J. Trump. Symptoms may include Trump-induced
general hysteria, which produces an inability to distinguish between legitimate policy
differences and signs of psychic pathology in President Donald J. Trump’s behavior. This
may be expressed by:
(1) verbal expressions of intense hostility toward President Donald J. Trump; and
(2) overt acts of aggression and violence against anyone supporting President Donald
J. Trump or anything that symbolizes President Donald J. Trump.

I am not making this up.

Read it.

If, of course, that’s what you want to be.

Read it.

Boarding schools, offering an alternative residential arrangement to the traditional home environment, have been under-studied regarding their impacts on students’ non-cognitive development. This study presents findings derived from a quasi-experimental design where changes in local educational policy caused a transition from voluntary to compulsory boarding. Results indicate that boarding students outperform their non-boarding counterparts in both cognitive and non-cognitive outcomes, with disadvantaged students exhibiting the largest gains. We attribute these effects to increased teacher engagement in course preparation, closer teacher-student interactions, and heightened student effort toward academic pursuits. These findings underscore the potential of boarding schools as a powerful catalyst for enhancing students’ human capital.

Sometimes the old ways are best.