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.

Read it.

The great objective of DEI was to tribalize our institutions, recruiting government and corporate employees into affinity groups based on their race, sex, sexuality and other factors, and then defining institutional goals around the ‘right’ tribal mix through selective hiring and promotions.

The complete inversion of civil rights, from race-neutral to race-conscious, also transformed the intended purpose of government and all lesser institutions, from tribal neutrality to tribal partisanship, and it was impossible to achieve this without tribalizing government.

Government and other institutions stopped being merit-based or democratic, and came to reflect the tribal coalition politics that had come to define the Democratic Party’s urban machines. Tammany Hall’s old corrupt apportionment of government offices based on political favors was smoothly supplemented with racial and ethnic coalition quotas in major cities.

‘Tribalization’ is a big step backward, civilizationally, and a major reason why African and Asian countries that had been controlled by colonial powers before independence pretty much all imploded after they were cut loose.

Read it.

So far, poetic justice seems the theme of this political year. And there’s nothing more poetically just or ironic than what the Donald Trump administration just did: Turned an app used to mass parole millions of aliens into an app to help those aliens leave the U.S.

In October 2020, U.S. Customs and Border Patrol launched the CBP One mobile application to help commercial trucking companies schedule cargo inspections at land ports of entry. Starting Jan. 20, 2021, the Biden administration deliberately opened U.S. borders and encouraged mass migration—causing a rapid increase in the number of illegal aliens encountered by CBP.

Following December 2022’s then-historic high of over 302,000 inadmissible alien nationwide encounters, the Biden administration rolled out its shell game. In January 2023, then-Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas announced that rather than illegally cross the border between ports of entry, illegal aliens should instead use the revamped CBP One app to make an appointment at a port of entry.

I’m with Rat on this one.

Read it.

If anyone in the future cares enough to write an authentic history of the 2024 presidential campaign, they might begin by noting that American politics exists downstream of American culture, which is a deep and broad river. Like any river, American culture follows a particular path, which has been reconfigured at key moments by new technologies. In turn, these technologies, which redefine both space and time—canals and lakes, the postal system, the telegraph, railroads, radio and later television, the internet, and most recently the networking of billions of people in real time on social media platforms—set the rules by which stories are communicated, audiences are configured, and individuals define themselves.

Something big changed sometime after the year 2000 in the way we communicated with each other, and the means by which we absorbed new information and formed a working picture of the world around us. What changed can be understood as the effect of the ongoing transition from the world of 20th-century media to our current digital landscape. This once-every-five-centuries revolution would have large effects, ones we have only just begun to assimilate, and which have largely rendered the assumptions and accompanying social forms of the past century obsolete, even as tens of millions of people, including many who imagine themselves to reside near the top of the country’s social and intellectual pyramids, continue to imagine themselves to be living in one version or another of the long 20th century that began with the advent of a different set of mass communications technologies, which included the telegraph, radio, and film.

The latter more often than the former, in my experience. YMMV.

Read it.

Two decades ago, CBS aired a bombshell report on the flu shot, revealing a truth that health officials didn’t want to admit. Despite flu shot uptake among seniors skyrocketing from 15% to 65%, flu deaths continued to climb.

NIH scientists were devastated. They expected the data to confirm the vaccine’s effectiveness. But instead, their own research shattered that assumption. So they assumed other factors must be “masking the true benefits of the shots.”

However, as Sharyl Attkisson reported at the time, “No matter how they crunched the numbers, they got the same disappointing result. Flu shots have not reduced deaths among the elderly.”

I don’t get flu shots because the only time I’ve ever gotten sick from something like the flu was after I got a flu shot.

Read it.

Dozens of students with Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD)—the university’s most anti-Semitic student group—and outside radicals stormed a campus building last April, hammering in glass windows, covering security cameras, dragging chairs and metal tables to barricade themselves inside, and holding one janitor captive. The extremists renamed the academic building “Hind’s Hall” and refused to leave until then-president Minouche Shafik authorized the NYPD to forcibly remove them.

Even though 22 students were arrested, the school only disciplined 4, while the other 18 remained in “good standing with the university” and were able to begin the fall semester normally. Columbia didn’t disclose how many students were disciplined Thursday.

It’s unclear if radicals who participated in the illegal campus encampments last spring were included in the sanctions. Columbia initially suspended 31 students, but those were later reversed, with three facing campus bans and a fourth placed on probation. Two weeks before the fall semester began, no expulsions had been delivered.

In other words, the response to this mob action was pitiful and grudging, and hence no deterrent to similar activities in the future. As a result, we’ll continue to see left-wing mobs roaming campuses nationwide.

Read it.

Farming arose on multiple continents among populations with radically different cultures and environments and with no means of communicating with each other – how did it crop up independently at about the same time?

The Hill, a Voice of the Crust.

A conservative commentator on Wednesday asked Irish Prime Minister Micheál Martin why he allowed American comedian Rosie O’Donnell to move to the country.

“Ireland is known for very happy, fun-loving people,” Brian Glenn, a conservative commentator for the digital media company Real America’s Voice, began a question to Martin during an Oval Office meeting with President Trump. “Why in the world would you let Rosie O’Donnell move to Ireland?”

“Thank you, I like that question,” Trump interjected as Martin nervously laughed while seated next to the president in the Oval Office. “Did you know you have Rosie O’Donnell? Do you know who she is?”

Martin did not respond before Trump added, “You’re better off not knowing.”

NPR, a Voice of the Crust at your expense.

As concerns swirl over the impacts of steep new tariffs on U.S. companies and consumers, so too does talk about how certain businesses try to avoid them.

‘Certain’ businesses? ALL businesses will try to avoid them; some more successfully than others.

President Trump’s long-threatened taxes on imports from China, Mexico and Canada took effect Tuesday, prompting retaliatory measures on American exports, roiling the stock market and fueling fears of an economic downturn.

Underscoring the fact that interference with trade is always an Unfriendly Act.

On Wednesday, Trump granted automakers a one-month reprieve from the tariffs, underscoring the unpredictability — and potential wiggle room — in his administration’s trade policy. On Thursday, he signed executive orders lifting tariffs on many Mexican and Canadian goods until April 2.

Trump is not a politician, and therefore not concerned much with ‘predictability’. He’s a businessman, and ‘wiggle room’ is what business is all about.

“I’m really interested to see how much of these threatened tariffs stick, and how many of our big industries will be able to get immediate reprieves like the auto industry has already done,” says Mary Anne Madeira, an assistant professor of international relations at Lehigh University. “And I’m hopeful that industries will get a lot of big carveouts and exemptions in a way that will really reduce the potential pain.”

Looks as if they had to reach way down the academic food chain to find somebody who would give them the credentialed comment they were looking for.

ZMan pulls back the curtain.

In the 2016 election cycle, the majority of the American people signaled that they were done with the ideological politics that had reigned since the Cold War. While Trump did not win a majority in the general election, the election as a whole, including the primaries, made clear that the public was ready to move on. The way to view the last three election cycles is as a long struggle by the public to drag the economic elites out of their isolation and back into politics.

That is what we saw in 2024 and what we are seeing now. What is happening in Washington is both revolutionary and just the start. The cutting of government payrolls is one part of a bigger change in how America operates. The United States is about to end its empire phase and return to being a big powerful country. It is a long overdue transformation that has been made possible by the economic elites realizing things had to change if they were going to remain elites.

Left out of this is what it means for Europe. The issue of Ukraine, for example, has the Europeans on the sidelines, muttering mad ideas to one another about how they will get along as American vassal states without America. They are drawing up grand schemes for re-arming Germany and developing their own nuclear arsenal, so they can pretend Brussels is an imperial hegemon and the political classes of the European states can continue as dysfunctional flunkies.

Polar Bear Science. (I am not making this up.)

New evidence indicates that Arctic areas with the thickest ice today probably melted out every year during the summer for about 1,600 years during the early Holocene (ca. 11.3-9.7k years ago), making the Arctic virtually ice-free. As I argue in my new book, this means that polar bears and other Arctic species are capable of surviving extended periods with ice-free summers: otherwise, they would not be alive today.

 

Read it.

More than a century before the Eurostar and LeShuttle, a group of engineers and statesmen dreamed (and fretted) about connecting Britain to France with an underwater tunnel. Peter Keeling drills into the history of this submarine link, and finds a still-relevant story about the cosmopolitan hopes and isolationist panic surrounding liberal internationalism.

Read it.

A huge ancient city has been found in the Amazon, hidden for thousands of years by lush vegetation.

The discovery changes what we know about the history of people living in the Amazon.

The houses and plazas in the Upano area in eastern Ecuador were connected by an astounding network of roads and canals.

The area lies in the shadow of a volcano that created rich local soils but also may have led to the destruction of the society.

Read it.

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

One of my biggest fears is that the manufacturer of a smart home product I use will go bankrupt and disappear overnight. It’s not an unfounded fear — just last year, smart home company Insteon abruptly announced that it would shut down its servers over financial difficulties. The servers would later return from the dead, but only because some loyal users acquired the entire company to keep its products alive. This isn’t a one-off example either — Philips stopped supporting its first-gen Hue Bridge in 2020 and MyQ’s garage door openers became incompatible with the Google Assistant without warning in 2023.

Many also care about the privacy implications of having cheaply made devices connect to the internet, but that’s a relatively smaller concern for me. Nevertheless, an offline smart home setup insulates me from both potential bankruptcy and privacy invasions.

The Spectator.

The rise of digital communications has been a boon but has also opened society to grave risks through cyber war. Ukraine found this out in the first years of its war with Russia. Just as worrying has been the penetration of television, the internet and streaming radio by hacker groups, both military and criminal. Attempts to change the narrative of society and sow discord through fake news and false information, denial-of-service attacks and interference with GPS signals have all been a serious challenge in the ongoing war. Ukraine has hit back with its own hacktivist networks, even disrupting Moscow television stations, and the cyber war continues.

Last year, in the United States, the FBI revealed the existence of a massive penetration of American telecommunications networks by China, conducted by a threat group dubbed ‘Volt Typhoon’. It had taken vast amounts of data about Americans, including text messages, and perhaps inserted malware into networks. This complex cyber-attack against routers and switching networks could have been ongoing for years. More recently, the spate of sabotage against data cables on the floor of the Baltic sea, involving Russian-linked or Chinese vessels, has raised alarm about communications and internet vulnerabilities for Nato allies.

Somtimes the old ways are best.

Why everybody melts down over the prospect of ‘neo-Nazis’ but nobody seems concerned about ‘neo-Commies’?

Perhaps it’s because the Nazis went away but the Commies never did….

Read it.

The case for getting out of NATO encompasses four fundamental propositions:

First, the Federal budget has become a self-fueling fiscal doomsday machine, even as the Fed has run out of capacity to monetize the skyrocketing public debt.

Second, the only viable starting point for fiscal salvation is slashing the nation’s elephantine Warfare State by at least $500 billion per year.

Third, the route to that end is a return to the “no entangling alliance” wisdom of the Founders, which means bringing the Empire Home, closing the 750 US bases abroad, scuttling much of the US Navy and Army and withdrawing from NATO and similar lesser commitments elsewhere.

Fourthly, jettisoning NATO requires debunking its Origins Story and the false claim that it brought peace and security to post-war America when what it actually did was transform Washington into the War Capital of the World, dominated by a panoptic complex of arms merchants, neocon warmongers and a vast Warfare State nomenklatura.

Read it.

Artificial intelligence has discovered ancient civilizations over 5,000 years old hidden beneath some of the world’s largest deserts, including one in the heart of the Dubai desert, without the use of a single shovel. In the Dubai desert, remains of human activity over 5,000 years old have been detected, including a buried city.

The discovery in the Dubai desert revealed ancient settlements and communication networks, indicating the presence of roads and settlements.

Advancements in remote sensing and data analysis using artificial intelligence have transformed archaeology, improving the efficiency and effectiveness of excavations. The integration of AI and Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) proved especially powerful. SAR technology provides high-resolution images of structures buried beneath the earth’s surface, capable of penetrating natural barriers such as sand, vegetation, and ice.

Read it.

On the wall of his living room in Lier, Belgium, Werner van Beethoven keeps a family tree. Thirteen generations unfurl along its branches, including one that shows his best known relative, born in 1770: Ludwig van Beethoven, who forever redefined Western music with compositions such as the Fifth Symphony, Für Elise, and others. Yet that sprig held a hereditary, and potentially scandalous, secret.

That Beethoven, Werner learned to his dismay in 2023, is biologically unrelated to Werner and his contemporary kin. This uncomfortable fact was brought to light by Maarten Larmuseau, a geneticist at KU Leuven who specializes in answering a question relatively few others have explored: How often do women have children with men they’re not partnered with?

In most societies, kinship is at least partly socially constructed, and for example can include adoption and stepfamilies. Yet questions about biological paternity have roiled families and fueled cultural anxieties for eons. Male authors have written about hidden paternity for millennia, including in Greek dramas and The Canterbury Tales; William Shakespeare and Molière wrote plays about it. Knowing a child’s biological father is also important for forensically identifying cadavers, recording accurate medical histories, and charting the manifold ways in which people structure families around the world.

Alex Tabarrok, a Real Economist.

I’m a professor of economics at George Mason University and today I’m going to share my screen and we are going to be talking about President Trump’s crypto executive order and what it means for American innovation, crypto taxation, and the global dominance of the dollar. Okay, so let’s get going. I’m going to pull several key sentences from the crypto order, including the first promoting and protecting the sovereignty of the United States dollar, including through actions to promote the development and growth of lawful and legitimate dollar backed stable coins worldwide. So first of all, what’s a stable coin? Well, we all know the price of Bitcoin and Bitcoin fluctuates. It’s 120, it’s 80 today. It goes up and down. It’s actually not a good transactions medium for that reason. So despite what Satoshi Nakamoto wanted, it’s not a good transactions medium. Stable coins, in contrast to Bitcoin are designed to maintain a stable value, typically relative to an already established currency.

Know the feeling.

Read it.

NATO is turning to the ongoing war in Ukraine for lessons as the alliance works to shift its strategy going forward. Tom Goffus, NATO’s Assistant Secretary General for Operations, presented five such lessons during a panel this week at the Air and Space Forces (AFA) Air Warfare Symposium in Aurora, Colorado.

“I got to NATO one month before the invasion, so [I had a] front row seat watching the whole thing,” Goffus told the audience. “I think it’s a critical topic.”

Prior to that, Goffus, a former U.S. Air Force F-15 pilot, served as Policy Director on the U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for European and NATO Policy, National Security Staff Director for Strategic and Eastern European Affairs, and Senior Military Advisor for European and Eurasian Affairs at the State Department.

Before unveiling his own takeaways, Goffus talked about the value of Ukraine’s acoustic sensor network for the detection of low-altitude detection of drones and cruise missiles.

“Essentially, Ukraine is covering its entire nation, 1,000 meters and below, with acoustic sensors for less than 50 million euros (nearly $54 million),” Goffus gushed. “It’s crazy what they’re doing with this.”

Many problems fix themselves, if given enough time. Think of it as evolution in action.

Donald Tusk, Prime Minister of Poland:

Five hundred million Europeans begging 300 million Americans to defend them from 140 million Russians. If you can count, count on yourself. Not in isolation, but with full awareness of your potential. Today, in Europe, we do not lack economic strength, people, but the belief that we are a global power.

UnHerd.

The venture capitalist Marc Andreessen is one of the most forthright individuals in Silicon Valley. Yet even this billionaire maintains that his fellow elites have been muzzled. Interviewed by Joe Rogan last November, Marc Andreessen said that many of his fellow tech entrepreneurs had been debanked by the Biden administration. The Obama administration, he said, had taken such action against marijuana businesses, escorts and gun shops; Biden’s, he said, pursued tech founders, preventing them from receiving payments, making them, or buying insurance. “This is one of the reasons why we ended up supporting Trump,” he told Rogan.

Debanking is when a bank closes an account in order to censor or punish the customer for political or religious views. The banks, in these cases, are typically responding to ideological pressure or to perceived reputational risk. As you might imagine, anger over debanking rapidly merged with concerns shared by crypto companies, which have also contended with access issues to traditional banking. One CEO shared a letter in which the bank Chase said it was closing his company’s account.

The complaints about debanking were echoed and amplified by Donald Trump. His wife, Melania, claims that she herself was debanked. More broadly, the MAGA movement has ample experience of being booted off social media platforms. The matter of tech debanking, therefore, has been rolled into existing MAGA complaints. By this account, the US government has restricted freedom of expression via several coercive means.

Read it.

“Their billionaires can’t own the Panama Canal ports. Only our billionaires can own the Panama Canal ports.”

Read it.

In the case-control study, individual-level analysis resulted in a hazard of skin cancer (of any type except basal cell carcinoma) that was 1.62 times higher among tattooed individuals (95% CI: 1.08–2.41). Twin-matched analysis of 14 twin pairs discordant for tattoo ink exposure and skin cancer showed HR?=?1.33 (95% CI: 0.46–3.84). For skin cancer and lymphoma, increased hazards were found for tattoos larger than the palm of a hand: HR?=?2.37 (95% CI: 1.11–5.06) and HR?=?2.73 (95% CI: 1.33–5.60), respectively. In the cohort study design, individual-level analysis resulted in a hazard ratio of 3.91 (95% CI: 1.42–10.8) for skin cancer and 2.83 (95% CI: 1.30–6.16) for basal cell carcinoma.

As with most such studies, this documents correlation, not causation, and therefore isn’t worth as much as it pretends to be.

Nevertheless, it’s comforting to know that, like tobacco and alcohol and opiates, this tends to be a self-correcting problem. Think of it as evolution in action.

Read it.

While we think of today’s metric system (SI) as mostly a modern invention (1960), we have been led to believe for many years now that its most fundamental base unit, the metre, originated in France in 1793, and represented one ten-millionth of the earth’s quadrant (the distance from the earth’s equator to the North Pole, as measured at sea level) . Yet just a few years ago, the late Pat Naughtin discovered that the proposal for a universal standard of length very close to the metre may in fact have originated much earlier, via Bishop John Wilkins, an English cleric and philosopher, and a member of the Royal Society, in the mid-1600s. Recent comments on Metric Views now bring even that assertion into doubt, with the discovery of a measuring device called the wand having been around much longer still.

It is known that the wand, divided into ten segments, was almost exactly, to within a few millimetres, the same length as today’s metre, and that it was used as long as 1000 years ago. But what if all these versions of the metre were simply the rediscovery (or the handing down over time) of a standard measure, equating to the metre, that was invented in Egypt over 4500 years ago?

When we think of units of measure used in Biblical times, the cubit usually springs to mind. In fact, opponents of metric conversion have often referred to the cubit, in jest at least, as having as much validity as the metre. Such people should be careful for what they wish for, for, as we shall see, the cubit and the metre may in fact be directly related – and remarkably both are directly traceable to the Great Pyramid at Giza.

Alex Tabarrok.

Robert Higgs coined the term regime uncertainty to illustrate the challenge faced by business under Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, when a flurry of unpredictable legislation such as the expansive and often unclear mandates of the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA), attempts at court packing, abrupt tax increases, and shifting labor policies, meant businesses couldn’t reliably forecast returns or risks. Uncertainty magnified bad policy causing investment to collapse and remain unprecedently low.

For the eleven-year period of 1930 to 1940, net private investment totaled minus $3.1 billion. Only in 1941 did net private investment ($9.7 billion) exceed the 1929 amount.

The data leave little doubt. During the 1930s, private investment remained at depths never plumbed in any other decade for which data exist.

Read it.

The majority of our exports to China are raw products like petroleum and soybeans, the two largest categories being exported, while the majority of China’s exports to the United States are manufactured products like computers and other technical equipment.

We send corn and sorghum to China, they ship us back batteries and toys. We sell them coal and ores, they sell us circuit boards and car parts. We ship them tanned hides and meat, and then receive back optical fibers and medical equipment.

Advanced societies buy raw resources from backward societies and sell them back the manufactured goods. We export scrap metal to China, they send us back steel. We send them scrap copper, they ship us back the equipment of which that copper is a component. We export polymers and import the finished ‘Made in China’ plastic products that fill up our stores.

Read it.

Not tired of winning yet….