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“Yew caint always git what you wownt….”  — Mick Jagger

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The new, immersive way to learn a language.

Learn vocabulary the natural, immersive way. Build your skills in French, Italian or Spanish whilst you read your favourite books.

This is a very intriguing concept. It attempts to mimic the natural way we expand our vocabulary in our native language, i.e. by inductive reasoning from seeing words in context in actual use. Of course, it makes the ‘reading’ more work, but it would seem to be more enjoyable than stolidly memorizing vocabulary lists. Can’t say that it’s a complete solution but it sure looks like a great first step. (And it appears to be free–always a plus.)

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Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, an outspoken climate alarmist, has a new $300 million mega yacht dubbed “Launchpad.” The billionaire’s ‘big boy’ toy collection continues to expand, which already includes a Gulfstream G650 private jet.

Bloomberg data shows the new 287-foot vessel arrived at Port Everglades in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, last Monday and has been moored ever since. The vessel departed from the Netherlands, where its well-known yacht builder, Feadship, is based, on February 29.

Lürssen is actually doing some interesting work in this area, including a system that uses methane to create hydrogen that is then burned to power the ship; the only products are CO2 and water.

The working poor are starting to wake up to the billionaires who push climate garbage initiatives that force them to buy costly electric vehicles, ban gas stoves, and replace meat with insects and plant-based foods while Zuck and other billionaires sail around the world in mega-yachts and fly around in private jets.

“Rich” means never having to give a shit about the environment.

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Reform UK, formerly the Brexit Party, is now more popular among male voters than the governing Conservative Party. Nearly one in five—or 19% of—British men back Reform.

The Tories, whose position in the polls has been in freefall amid constant failures to control the nation’s borders and manage the economy, are trailing on a meagre 17%. Twenty-nine per cent of men are either undecided or know they won’t vote, while 41% back Labour.

That is all according to a new YouGov poll reported in The Sunday Times, which also suggests that Reform is ahead of the Conservatives overall in the north of England—particularly in culturally conservative, so-called ‘Red Wall’ seats which leant their backing to the Conservatives in 2019 in the hope of “getting Brexit done.”

The news comes less than a fortnight after former UKIP leader Nigel Farage, who is ‘honorary president’ of Reform, said Britain’s political class didn’t understand the significance of former Tory deputy chairman Lee Anderson’s defection to Reform UK.

‘I refuse to say capitalism, because 1) Marx invented it as a stick to bash the free market, and 2) no one can define what capitalism is, aside from “I know it when I see it. Maybe, if I don’t look too closely.”’  — Alma Boykin

UnHerd.

International diplomacy requires countless decisions: the large, small, mundane and monumental. Some turn out to have been wise and some not; some can be corrected, while others bring consequences that must be survived. A few are so pivotal that they reset the course of history.

We can’t be certain how the world would be different had a different course been chosen, but we can identify turning points and their cascading tumbles of consequences. And we can hypothesise an alternative history that, absent some fateful step, might have unfolded instead. Such “Planet Ifs” are more than thought experiments; if we can uncover what these wrong turns have in common, we can try harder to avoid them in the future. To see how, let’s consider four.

How many people are alive today merely because you didn’t want to go to prison?

“Our society, after all, operates on guilt, which often serves only to obscure its real workings and to prevent obvious solutions. An adrenaline high can be just as addictive as any other kind of high.”  — Frank Herbert

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Until I read Catherine Pakaluk’s fascinating new book, Hannah’s Children: The Women Quietly Defying the Birth Dearth, I was unaware that I had grown up in what is now considered to be a “large family.” I am the oldest of five children, but my father came from a family of 11 and my mother was one of 7. In the rural Reformed church communities where I live, a family of five children is considered “average” rather than “large.” But communities with large families are now a social aberration. With the exception of a few religious pockets, the birth rate is cratering in every single Western country.

Pakaluk, a social scientist and mother of eight, decided to investigate why, as small families, “DINKs” (dual income, no kids), and overt anti-natalism become the norm, some 5% of American women choose to have five or more children. She traveled across the country and interviewed 55 college-educated mothers with large families to ask them why they chose to have children and why they chose to have more. Pakaluk also explains why, despite concerted efforts at pro-natalist policies by governments, none have successfully boosted the birth rate to replacement level.

John C. Wright passes on the wisdom of Scott from Twitter (to which I do not subscribe, so I had to see it second-hand).

Next week, Trump could make over $4 billion when his media company goes public, removing all doubt about his billionaire status.

And you can stop asking if he would have been better off putting his inheritance in a savings account in the 70s.

I expect Trump to leave a 15% tip for Leticia James and the Democrats because they made his windfall possible by hunting him and censoring him for years. You can call it a bond, not a tip, if you prefer.

When the Supreme Court tosses out the unconstitutional fine, Trump gets most of his “tip” back.

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That has always puzzled me.

The patient’s teeth appeared to be well cared for, but dentist James Mancini did not like the look of his gums. By chance, Mancini knew the man’s physician, so he raised an alert about a potential problem — and a diagnosis soon emerged.

“Actually, Bob had leukemia,” says Mancini, clinical director of the Meadville Dental Center in Pennsylvania. Though he wasn’t tired or having other symptoms, “his mouth was a disaster,” Mancini says. “Once his physician saw that, they were able to get him treated right away.”

Oral health is tightly connected to whole-body health, so Mancini’s hunch is not surprising. What is unusual is that the dentist and doctor communicated.

How come we have biological males who ‘identify’ as female competing in women’s sports, but no biological females who ‘identify’ as male competing in male sports?

ZMan’s weekly podcast. Highly recommended.

Intellectual history is generally the study of good ideas or what we currently think are good ideas, but it is the bad ideas that have the most impact. The use of slave labor in the New World, for example, seemed like a good idea at the time but has proven to be a terrible burden on us. If the slavers knew that their descendants would be tormented by the consequences of slavery, would they still have done it?

Of course, the life of a bad idea is the result of the people choosing to embrace the bad idea, often when it is obviously a bad idea. Much of what Marx had to say about economics, even in the context of his age, was obvious nonsense. Further, people knew enough about the human condition to know that communism could never possibly work, but intellectuals chose to embrace it anyway.

Put another way, stupid ideas need a special sort of stupid person. Orwell famously wrote, “One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that; no ordinary man could be such a fool.” Orwell was addressing the educated opinion in England at the time that Germany would win the war. The basic concept is something of a universal, as we see today with our “expert” class.

ZMan touches the third rail.

There seems to be a secret plot to inject the idea of cutting Social Security into the national debate for the looming presidential election. This plot is among the slithering lizard people known as the conservatives. It started with the oleaginous Ben Shapiro demanding that white people work until they die. He then went to Twitter to gin up more talk among the mouth breathers in favor of cutting Social Security. Now the Republican Party is promoting the idea in Congress.

It is an odd coincidence that once Trump secured the nomination, his alleged allies started talking up an idea that has no constituency. No one wants to throw their granny into the street, and no one wants to throw their parents into the streets. More important, the tens of millions of retired white people do not want to be thrown into the streets, especially in the name of sending their last pennies to Israel. It is the third rail of politics for a reason, so why are these reptiles bringing it up now?

The most popular reason is they hope to slime Trump with this issue, thus undermining his general election campaign. They assume, and probably correctly, that the mass media will claim he wants to murder your granny in the promised bloodbath this autumn, no matter what Trump says about the subject. So far, Trump has mostly ignored it, only mentioning the problems of fraud in Medicare. Fraud is a massive problem with Medicare, but fraud is a defining feature of America now.

Power Line.

We have written about the Great Sort many times, but frankly you can’t emphasize it enough. Americans are deserting blue states and cities in favor of red zones. Liberalism has proved to be a failure by the most reliable measure: fewer and fewer people want to live under liberal regimes.

Babylon Bee.

As the debate in the United States continued to rage over the ongoing migrant crisis along the southern border, Mexico announced plans to begin construction on a wall to keep illegal immigrants from coming back.

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Fifty percent of New Yorkers say they plan to leave New York City over the next five years, according to a poll released Tuesday by the Citizens Budget Commission.

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The view that Biology and Culture generally trump Policy is probably going to become a mainstay in my pieces. But I’ll use this one to explicitly argue for why Culture (mostly) beats Policy, using one of the most convincing examples: the decline in birth rates observed across developed nations and subsequent efforts to reverse the trend. This adds empirical depth to some theoretical considerations.

“Policy”, as used by the Cloud People, is merely a euphemism for “government policy”, and government policy has never been effectual in overriding culture. Witness Prohibition in the U.S.

Power Line.

If you’ve wondered how liberals expect you to heat your house after they have outlawed fossil fuels, the short answer is heat pumps. Heat pumps have joined “batteries” as the all-purpose “green” solution. But in reality, they are no solution at all.

The American Mind.

The changing character of the American Right is a favorite topic of liberal commentators and politicians. The arguments made on this score are invariably not just observations but evaluations: the Right is getting worse—a lot worse. The Right has become more radical and authoritarian, and today’s leaders of the Right are a big step down, on the liberal telling, from the allegedly sober and responsible leaders of the American Right in the past—including Presidents Nixon, Reagan, and Bushes, all of whom were reviled as fascists in their time.

It is true that American politics have changed considerably in the last few decades. But the changes have not been on the Right alone. However one would judge the overall state of American liberalism today, it is undeniable as an empirical matter that many intellectual and moral reflexes that prominently and reliably characterized the Left in the past are no longer evident. And these changes are just as worthy of our attention as any analysis of the American Right.

I suspect that the world would be a better place.

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The foundation that administers an award in the name of the late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg announced Monday night that it was canceling this year’s ceremony after criticism from her family about the slate of honorees.

The Spectator.

Let’s play a guessing game: I’m a dangerous force threatening Americans’ health, safety and way of life. We largely rely on government agencies to monitor and manage me. What to do about me is still a matter of debate, as is the severity of the menace I actually create. The media is likely sensationalizing the threat. A new study suggests I’m “not as bad as originally thought,” that reports of the devastation I’m causing were “premature,” and that if you’re outside a specific subset of people I disproportionately affect, you wouldn’t know I exist. Still, there are interactive maps to track my movement, and I’m reported to be related to a new, “hard-to-eradicate, super” strain invading from a foreign country.

What am I?

Yep, you guessed it. I’m a feral pig.

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Every year, migrants and refugees transfer billions of euros from Germany to family members in their home countries, with the Bundesbank estimating this to be at least €6.8 billion per year.

I suspect this is dwarfed by the amount of money sent to Mexico every year by ‘migrants’, legal and illegal.

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In the last year Greece has spent about $400 million on a unique Israeli combat system. The new Fire Weaver Fire Control system uses Orbiter 3 UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles) to seek out targets and automatically have a Spike NLOS missile launched from an aircraft, ground vehicle or ship to hit the target. Israel developed this system over several decades and it is now widely used in the Israeli military.

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The following excerpts are from Tragedy and Hope. They detail the monetary environment from 1914 to the 1930s. When looked at independently the context helps explain the confusion we find across today’s monetary landscape.

These passages help us better understand money and the lack of order that takes hold when international players desire a change to the system. The greatest challenge then and now was the battle between real wealth and claims on wealth.

The Spectator.

Lent which, under Orthodox tradition means no eggs, meat or dairy (or even fish for designated periods), can be weirdly enjoyable, if only for the break in routine and the longings it unleashes. Besides, set it beside Ramadan, when during the hours of daylight even water can’t be drunk, and you realize things could be a whole lot worse.

Today is Forgiveness Sunday (Sunday of Cheesefare). Full Great Lent starts officially tomorrow.

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As a scholar of Arthurian literature, particularly that of England in the 15th century, I have a professional appreciation for the existence of physical media. If, instead of diligently writing out his Le Morte Darthur, Sir Thomas Malory had only told his story aloud to friends, relatives, and his gaoler, we almost certainly would not have had the benefit of it over the intervening centuries that have passed since his death. Like so many other fascinating but ephemeral pieces of the past, it would have entirely disappeared, leaving future generations deprived of that which they did not even have the chance to know.

Physical connexions to the past are not only of interest to scholars of literature and history; both well-known texts and more recent discoveries such as the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Nag Hammadi library are obvious examples of how ancient written works quite clearly continue to influence the modern world, shaping the religious beliefs and practises of countless people. Such physical records are vital for providing insight into contemporary differences and debates, but they also serve as an objective authority that can speak for the past in a way that no credible scholar can simply dismiss without cause. It is for this reason that George Orwell’s 1984, with its nightmare vision of a totalitarian future, portrays a world in which The Party endlessly destroys and rewrites every record of the past. Once history is destroyed, truth ceases to be a matter of conformity to objective facts and becomes instead a matter of compliance with the powerful.

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Skip stand-ups and all-hands. Evade Easter brunches, birthdays, and graduations.

Decline invitations by default. When you’re essential to an event, its host will notify you.

If you must attend an unfun event, make it memorable! Play pranks and plan ruses!

Don’t ghost. Never leave others hanging. Decline invitations with ample notice.

You’re going to die. Spend your time unapologetically. Be polite but direct. Never succumb to obligation.

Good advice.

“Feminists are all about equality until a bill comes or a fight starts.” — Taylor the Fiend (on YouTube)

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A little over a century ago, in his 1920 encyclical Principi Apostolorum Petro, Pope Benedict XV declared the 4th century poet, theologian, and writer, Saint Ephrem the Syrian, the Deacon of Edessa, to be a Doctor of the Church, a high and rare honor of the universal church. The 24th person so recognized since the Middle Ages, Saint Ephrem, was the first who did not come from the Western (Latin) Church or Eastern (Greek) Church. He was a speaker of Syriac and wrote exclusively in that language. In his encyclical, the pope mentioned the many clerics and bishops who encouraged him to take this step, especially the patriarchs of the Maronite, Chaldean, and Syriac Catholic churches, all spiritual descendants of Saint Ephrem.

…

The ‘Syriac World’ (some prefer the term Assyrian or Aramean) is the ethnic and religious community that grew out of the Syriac language and Christianity in Late Antiquity—Syriac being a branch of Aramaic, the lingua franca of most of the Middle East in the centuries before the coming of Christ. This status was retained for centuries, until Syriac was displaced by Arabic with the triumph of Islam. The roots of Syriac especially look to Edessa (the modern city of Urfa in Turkey), the city of Saint Ephrem. From there, as much as from nearby Antioch and more distant Jerusalem, and from the peregrinations of Saint Paul, “Christianity, an Asiatic religion,” spread both east and west. The Syriac world became a largely Christian one, best understood in a group of often contending, fissiparous religious bodies, which were often in conflict with their counterparts in Constantinople and Rome: the (Assyrian) Church of the East (disparagingly called the Nestorian Church); the Syrian Orthodox Church (sometimes called the Jacobite Church); various Indian branches of these churches; and related church bodies using Syriac and in communion with the pope in Rome, such as the Maronite Catholic, Chaldean Catholic, Syriac Catholic, Syro-Malabar, and Syro-Malankaran churches. Today, all of these churches have diaspora communities in the West, which are sometimes larger and richer than the original communities from where they sprang in the East.

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Tyler Cowen.

At first people thought that drones favored defense, since Ukraine, in its war against Russia, was defending successfully with drones. But now Ukraine is using drones to attack Russia, and Russian oil refinery assets and warships. It is less obvious that drones are defensive assets on net. Furthermore, Russia is now using more electronic jamming, and more weapons that are drone-avoiding or drone-resistant, thereby limiting the defensive value of drones.

The American Mind.

I learned about the “Poverty Simulation” by means of a colleague’s letter to campus announcing such an event at the central Pennsylvania liberal arts university where I work. My colleague explained that “many families” in the local communities around the campus are in poverty. The figure she gave was 6 percent, leading me to wonder if “many” is the best term used to describe a phenomenon not being experienced by 94 percent of the people under discussion; also, since the national poverty rate is closer to 12 percent, it would be worth noting that the local poverty rate is extraordinarily low.

In any case, the school looks to involve our students in collaborative work with local communities, and so my colleague argued that they should know something about all this poverty. Such knowledge will require “dispell[ing]…preconceived notions about the experience and roots of poverty,” and an excellent method for dispelling such notions is “through experiencing and sensitizing participants to the realities of poverty.” The Poverty Simulation, I learned from my colleague’s letter, is “not a game [but rather] a role play in which participants get to experience the difficult choices” of those in poverty.

I wonder whether those of us who were actually poor when we were younger can test out of this for credit.

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Charges will not be filed against a 32-year-old man who shot a gun Thursday in a crowded New York City subway car, with authorities saying he was acting in self-defense when he took a gun from an aggressor and shot him with it.

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The family of late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is sounding off about this year’s class of honorees for a female leadership award named after the liberal icon.

Not unlike the feelings of the families of people who create and fund foundations (Rockefeller, Ford) and see the trustees of such foundations underwrite all sorts of Woke shit that the creators would have found offensive. Welcome to our world, proglodytes.

“The law of supply and demand is not taught in Gender Studies.” — “Red Pill Guy”

ZMan’s weekly podcast. Highly recommended.

One of the weird things about the Cloud people is how they talk about history as if it is a spirit force or a god. In his State of the Union speech, Biden kept saying things like “history is watching us” and “history requires us” as if “history” was the name of the guy controlling the simulation. He is not the only one who does this. In fact, he never talked like this until the rest of the Cloud people started doing it.

One reason for talking about history this way is it gives them a false sense of moral authority for their various schemes. They claim that history moves toward some paradise, so if their schemes advance us toward that paradise, then they must be on the side of history. It is all nonsense, of course, but nonsense has been the fuel of fanatics and lunatics since the dawn of time.

Even with a sober-minded ruling class, however, there would still be this need to shape history so that the present feels inevitable. Much of what has brought us to the present crisis is the shaping of history to fit the causes of the moment. Our progressive ruling class has been rewriting history since Gettysburg, maybe even since the Battle of Naseby, because the future is certain, but the past is unpredictable.

ZMan waxes nostalgic.

Baltimore combines the mindset of the postal clerk with the intellectual dexterity of the population.