Read it.

Hares are mammals belonging to the genus Lepus. They are herbivores and live either in pairs or alone. They nest in slight depressions, which are known as ‘forms’, and their young, known as leverets, are able to fend for themselves shortly after birth.

Hares are very different from rabbits. For one, they are generally much bigger than rabbits, and they have longer ears and more powerful, longer legs. They can reach speeds of up to 40mph when evading predators. Their habitats also vary considerably, with hares preferring open areas such as fields and grasslands, while rabbits are often found in shrubby areas where they create burrows called warrens.

Under British Forest Law, hunted prey were divided into two classes: Beasts of the Chase (red deer, roe deer, fallow deer, boar, fox, marten) and Beasts of the Warren (rabbits, partridge, pheasant, grouse, quail). Beasts of the Chase were reserved to the King, but Beasts of the Warren were reserved to the landlord.

Quillette.

With rare exceptions, most of the articles about the Trump administration’s science-funding policies have discussed them in catastrophic terms.

Because, as we all know, no science was ever done prior to it being the TOTAL RESPONSIBILITY of the U.S. government–and the U.S. taxpayer.

A professor at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine has called cuts to research funding the “apocalypse of American science.” Critics believe this will sound the death knell of the American economy and our scientific leadership. Despite this widespread condemnation, the administration shows no signs of changing course. The most recent estimate suggests that basic research endowments will fall by US$15 billion in 2026.

Just think of all those ‘research scientists’ having to go out and get a Real Job.

These claims are worth examining in more detail. For a start, the best available evidence does not demonstrate that federal science funding predicts economic growth. This claim has been evaluated multiple times, sometimes decades apart. In 1989, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) audited R&D investments and determined that federally financed research was having no significant effect on the economy. The Congressional Budget Office reached the same conclusion during its assessment in 1998. Another BLS audit in 2007 found that: “Returns to many forms of publicly financed R&D are near zero.”

International audits have returned similar results. In the late 1990s, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) looked at economic growth differences between countries, and reported their findings in 2003. The OECD could find “no clear-cut relationship between public R&D activities and growth.”

Even if the analysis is restricted to the “golden era” of NIH funding in the 1950s and 1960s, the effect on US growth is suspect. Given the massive public investment at that time, subsequent years should have demonstrated more rapid economic growth. But they did not. The annual growth rate of GDP after the 1950s was fairly stable. Terence Kealey has noted that total factor productivity (TFP) and other measurements that account for technological change fell in the post WWII era as federal science budgets expanded.

Read it.

Dogger Bank has a perimeter of 720 km and area of 17,600 km2, compared to Wales’ 20,600km2. It’s almost entirely within Britain’s territorial waters (sorry Germany). And it’s only 15-40 m below sea level to boot – so at depths humanity has constructed large engineering projects before.

Headline results: we estimate raising Dogger Bank would cost £97.5bn, but would bring present value benefits of £622 bn. Under the government’s standard method of cost-benefit analysis, this project would get a go-ahead, with a cost-benefit ratio of 6.2.

This would be way cool.

Read it.

As illegals flood into Blue States, Americans are migrating to Red States. Guess who wins?

UPDATE: Migration to Red States Is Accelerating, Study Says

Been there, done that.

BuzzFeed.

Try to figure out how many of these are written by women. My count is about 2/3.

Read it.

In the wake of a mass shooting in New York City that killed four people, Sen. John Kennedy, R-La., said “idiot control” is needed rather than gun control.

Barring young black males from possessing any kind of weapon would be a step in the right direction.

Been there, done that.

The Telegraph (UK)

A toddler in India bit a venomous cobra so hard that he killed it.

Two-year-old Govinda Kumar was playing in his home in Bankatwa, a village in the eastern Indian state of Bihar, when he spotted the three-foot long snake and grabbed it.

The cobra lunged at the child and coiled itself around his tiny hands during the incident on Friday, his relatives said.
But instead of screaming, Govinda put the snake’s head in its mouth and clenched his jaw, Mateshwari Devi, the boy’s grandmother, recounted.

He quickly lost consciousness after ingesting some of the deadly venom, but was treated in hospital and has since been discharged.

The snake died on the spot.

A future Avenger.

Read it.

Left wing comedian Bill Maher admitted on Monday that he was dead wrong about the effect of President Trump’s tariffs – saying in an episode of his “Club Random”podcast that while many economists predicted tat Trump’s tariffs would immediately lead to inflation, he was among the doomsayers who were wrong.

Bloomberg, a Voice of the Crust.

Tesla Inc. has a plan to fend off cheaper competition from China with a $25,000 electric car. But first it has to overhaul a 100-year-old manufacturing process pioneered by Henry Ford.

The company is moving to what it calls an “unboxed” approach, which is more like building Legos than a traditional production line. Instead of a large, rectangular car moving along a linear conveyer belt, parts are assembled simultaneously in dedicated areas and then all put together at the end. Tesla says the change could reduce manufacturing footprints by more than 40%, allowing the carmaker to build future plants far faster and at less expense.

Changing a linear tree and branch model for a decentralized bush and swarm model. It might even work.

Of course, anybody who actually thinks that Tesla will ever put out a car that can be bought for $25,000 (Foolish Mortal) is smoking and not sharing.

New York magazine, so much a Voice of the Crust that I am amazed at so hypergamy-realistic anti-FemiNazi article survived to be published.

When we decided we wanted to be equal to men, we got on men’s time. We worked when they worked, retired when they retired, had to squeeze pregnancy, children, menopause somewhere impossibly in the margins. I have a friend, in her late 20s, who wears a mood ring; these days it is often red, flickering in the air like a siren when she explains her predicament to me. She has raised her fair share of same-age boyfriends. She has put her head down, worked laboriously alongside them, too. At last she is beginning to reap the dividends, earning the income to finally enjoy herself. But it is now, exactly at this precipice of freedom and pleasure, that a time problem comes closing in. If she would like to have children before 35, she must begin her next profession, motherhood, rather soon, compromising inevitably her original one. The same-age partner, equally unsettled in his career, will take only the minimum time off, she guesses, or else pay some cost which will come back to bite her. Everything unfailingly does. If she freezes her eggs to buy time, the decision and its logistics will burden her singly — and perhaps it will not work. Overlay the years a woman is supposed to establish herself in her career and her fertility window and it’s a perfect, miserable circle. By midlife women report feeling invisible, undervalued; it is a telling cliché, that after all this, some husbands leave for a younger girl. So when is her time, exactly? For leisure, ease, liberty? There is no brand of feminism which achieved female rest. If women’s problem in the ’50s was a paralyzing malaise, now it is that they are too active, too capable, never permitted a vacation they didn’t plan. It’s not that our efforts to have it all were fated for failure. They simply weren’t imaginative enough.

Read it.

A visitor to a French museum bit into a fresh banana worth millions of dollars taped to a wall last week, exhibitors said on Friday, in the latest such consumption of the conceptual artwork.

Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan — whose provocative creation entitled “Comedian” was bought for $6.2 million in New York last year — said he was disappointed the person did not also eat the skin and the tape.

After the hungry visitor struck on Saturday last week, “security staff rapidly and calmly intervened,” the Pompidou-Metz museum in eastern France said.

Saw that coming.

Read it.

One of the clearest and most recent tests of the Overton Window’s positioning, what society currently deems acceptable, came last week with two major ad campaigns from Nike and American Eagle. Unlike the backlash faced by Bud Light or Jaguar for pushing controversial leftist propaganda, these two brands steered away from woke landmines and promoted either a pro-family theme or actress Sydney Sweeney.

To begin the week, Nike posted a pro-family ad featuring pro-golfer Scottie Scheffler’s win at the 2025 British Open at Royal Portrush on Sunday. Nike’s marketing department released a highly unusual ad … not the usual left-wing politics or ‘body positivity’ nonsense, but a pro-family sports ad celebrating fatherhood and family.

Based Americans, not infected with the Marxist woke mind virus, cheered online, with many demanding more pro-family ads and less “woke BS” ads

New York Post.

Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) is taking aim at socialist Big Apple mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani – with aerial ads urging fed-up New Yorkers to flee to Florida.

“Hate Socialism? Us too! Move 2 FL,” read the banners the Sunshine State senator will fly over New York beaches this weekend.

In a statement, Scott described the ad campaign as a “friendly reminder” to New Yorkers that “in addition to our world class beaches, Florida is the state where you can escape socialism.”

Hivekit.

Futurama must have been amazing. No – not the TV series, but the model city it is named after, built for the 1939 New York’s World’s Fair by Norman Bel Geddes. It showed a bold vision for the future: thousands of tiny cars moving on wide highways – all without the need for a human driver. This future wasn’t too far away either – 1960 was the year envisioned for full self-driving cars by its creator.

77 years later, in 2016 Tesla announced “Full Self-Driving Hardware on All Teslas”. This was exciting. Chilling in the back of your car, watching a movie while being chauffeured to your destination sounded like a dream.

Today, in 2024, full self-driving is still mostly a dream. Outside of a few pilot projects in restricted areas, it is no more available than it was in 1939. And there are good reasons for that. For one, traffic is much more messy, chaotic, and unpredictable than it looks on the surface. And then, government regulators and legislators move at a snail’s pace when compared to technologists.

Gizmodo, a Voice of the Crust.

Tea, an app that lets women “rate” and “review” the men in their lives, has been on a hot streak lately, having shot to the top of the App Store and enjoyed several recent write-ups in major media outlets. Unfortunately, the app has now disclosed a data breach involving self-submitted user images. One report cites claims that some of the data has been shared on 4chan, the incel-ridden internet backwater best known for helping to spawn the QAnon conspiracy theory.

404 Media first reported on the data breach, writing that users from 4chan “claim to have discovered an exposed [Tea] database hosted on Google’s mobile app development platform, Firebase.” The notorious site’s resident trolls bragged that they were parsing personal data and selfies from the app’s internal databases.

404 attempted to verify the claims made on the site. “While reporting this story, a URL the 4chan user posted included a voluminous list of specific attachments associated with the Tea app,” the outlet wrote. While the files were initially viewable, the page now gives an error and 404 says that it “verified that Tea does contain the same storage bucket URL that 4chan claims was related to the exposure.” Gizmodo has not been able to independently verify this reporting.

Gizmodo is one of the supposedly-tech-oriented pubs that pivoted to Wokery during the COVID panic because the money was better and they get to signal their virtue by promoting the Narrative. The ritualistic phrases ‘incel-ridden internet backwater’, ‘QAnon’, and ‘conspiracy theory’ are characteristic.

The Telegraph (UK).

Robot bricklayers are set to be trialled on British construction sites amid warnings of a major labour shortage in the house building industry.

The machines, developed by Dutch company Monumental, use two mechanical arms that dispense mortar and lay bricks at a similar pace to a human.

That is equivalent to roughly 500 bricks per robot in a typical eight-hour shift, but they can be programmed to work around the clock if required – albeit under human supervision.

It represents one potential solution to help ease a chronic shortage of brickies in Britain’s construction industry, with experts warning that at least 25,000 more are needed to meet the Government’s house-building plans.

And eventually coming to America, presumably.

Illegal immigrants, call your coyote.

Watch it.

The Feral Historian does a deep dive on constraints due to people, technology, living space, frontiers and walls.

His discussion of the role of military service in a modern society (under the guise of a discussion of STAR TREK) is fascinating. One of the historical functions (not purposes; be sure to appreciate the distinction between those two concepts) is to absorb the excess young male population of the Underclass (who would otherwise cause trouble–sound familiar?) and the prospective heirs of the Overclass (who would otherwise lead revolts–sound familiar?) and (through training and service) turn them into folks invested in the current state of their culture. Just think about that for a bit.

The Paris Review.

By Isabelle Rea March 22, 2024 ON THINGS

What can’t be contained? Not much. We are given the resources, mental or physical, to contain our emotions and our belongings. Failing to do so often registers as weakness.

The smallest container you can buy at the Container Store is a rectangular crystal-clear plastic box available in orange, purple, and green. It can contain one AA or two AAA batteries, half a handful of Tic Tacs, or a folded-up tissue. The largest container you can buy at the Container Store is a four-tiered metal shelving unit. It can contain other containers.

Containers mediate us and our stuff. They create boundaries and allow our items to exist multiple feet above the ground. Most spaces are divided by containers. These containers might then be divided by additional containers. Containers form a scaffold, or an architecture. They make walls scalable and underbeds reachable. They allow you to put something down and know where it is the next time you want to pick it up.

Whenever I enter a Container Store, some shop assistant always comes up and asks what I’m looking for. I invariably reply, “I’m looking for the thing I don’t know I need until I see it.” They always laugh and nod.

Read it.

Vice President JD Vance unleashed a fiery takedown of Corporate America’s relentless outsourcing of U.S. jobs, zeroing in on Big Tech’s shameless dependence on foreign workers through the grossly misused H-1B visa program, slamming it as a betrayal of American workers.

“You see some big tech companies where they’ll lay off 9,000 workers, and then they’ll apply for a bunch of overseas visas. And I sort of wonder; that doesn’t totally make sense to me,” Vance said during an interview at the All-In AI Policy Summit in Washington, DC.

Satya Nadella (from Hyderabad), the Chairman of Microsoft, doesn’t want to manage Americans, he wants to manage Indians, his people.

Similarly, Sundar Pichai (from Tamil Nadu) at Google/Alphabet, doesn’t want to manage Americans, he wants to manage Indians, his people.

Black people want to hire black people. Indians want to hire Indians. Latinos want to hire Latinos. Homosexuals want to hire homosexuals. Why this comes as a surprise to anybody escapes me. These groups know that DEI is bullshit, that ‘diversity’ is a weakness, not a strength, and that a homogeneous workforce is more efficient and more effective than a random bunch of strangers.

The Economist.

Even in the most speculative reaches of science fiction, there is no escaping humanity’s dependence on liquid water. Luke Skywalker, the hero of the original “Star Wars” trilogy, grows up on his uncle’s moisture farm, extracting water from Tatooine’s arid atmosphere. The residents of the desert world Arrakis, accessible to anyone with a copy of Frank Herbert’s novel “Dune” (or with three hours to kill at their nearest cinema), likewise use windtraps to steal precious liquid from the air.

Engineers on Earth, too, are increasingly looking to the atmosphere for water. They have good reason to do so. Even in the depths of Chile’s Atacama Desert, often called the driest place on Earth, estimates suggest that fog and dew can generate some 200ml of water per square metre. Elsewhere, the atmosphere is even more generous. Worldwide, it is estimated to contain 12,900 cubic kilometres of water, roughly the volume of Lake Superior. Moreover, models indicate that evaporation driven by global warming will increase these levels by 27% over the course of the next 50 years.

Tapping this invisible reservoir is a priority. As Earth’s temperatures rise and its population grows, ever more people are likely to run short of water. More than 2.3bn are currently living in water-stressed countries and analysts predict that further droughts will force roughly a third of these to move from their homes by 2030.

Read it.

If the world of research were an ecosystem, with scientists of different disciplines representing different species, then physicists would be classified as invaders. After all, they’ve spread their methods and tools to many other fields over the years, infiltrating not only other natural sciences but the social sciences too.

Born from this invasion, interdisciplinary fields such as sociophysics and econophysics have been developed, in which mathematical models from physics are applied to social contexts, including traffic, crowds and financial markets. These new areas – and the models involved – are part of what’s known as complex systems theory. It concerns systems composed of many elements that interact with each other, producing a collective behaviour that could not be understood if the properties of the individual components were considered in isolation.

But while sociophysics and econophysics are now recognized disciplines, the application of physics to linguistics – known as language dynamics – is less familiar. In fact, we have come across referee reports that have questioned the seriousness of research papers by physicists on this topic. So if you’re one of these strange physicists studying problems that traditionally are part of linguistics, how should you react? Well, swearing is one option.

Read it.

Complex and dynamic systems self-regulate, moving through equilibrium states in response to stimuli and feedback. Seen from the outside, these systems, because they are complex and not deterministic, look like they are guided by some kind of invisible hand. We have a word for it: homeostasis.

In opposition to the simplistic thinking of journalists, politicians and morons (but I repeat myself), homeostasis is a primary reason why all models are wrong (though some are useful). The more complex the system being modeled, the less likely it is that anyone can accurately predict the future, because the systems have incredibly complex feedback mechanisms.

And yet, thanks to homeostasis, the world is far more stable than “experts” can understand. The ocean, for example, never tops 31C – when it gets close, storms invariably emerge and provide cooling. We live in a chaotic system that nevertheless ends up looking like it is externally regulated, because climate inherently seems to resist “runaway” scenarios.

And it works because complex systems prove to be far more resilient than we might have thought at first. Simple systems fail when stressed, but the very best systems are complex: they contain lots of independent actors, often in tension with each other.

These systems work: Think of all the predictions of global financial collapse that have sounded very sensible – but have yet to come true. The global financial system has countless actors of all kinds, and it often seems to defy gravity; it is simply too complicated to be able to pinpoint when, for example, the US debt is going to lead to a fundamental economic crisis – I remember Democrats predicting it would happen way back when Reagan was president! The timing of even inevitable outcomes seems to remain far beyond our reach.

For non-metric people, 9 kilograms is almost twenty pounds. Apparently he was wearing it for ‘weight training’. (Had he been an ‘aspiring rapper’ and the chain made out of gold, as is traditional, he’d probably be alive today.)

Well, anyway, think of it as evolution in action.

Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.

Watch it.

Rory Sutherland is one of the most entertaining thinkers I’ve ever seen.

I think you’ll agree.

Read it.

Starting with a meme and a joke on social media, the ‘Nicolas’ movement—named after a common first name that now symbolises the frustration of young working people in France—has become a mass phenomenon in just a few weeks. It speaks to workers who feel they are financing a bloated state that has nothing to offer them in return. Meanwhile, other French people are rallying under the banner of the ‘Gueux’ (beggars) and making their discontent heard. Could the government now be facing a new wave of unrest similar to the Yellow Vest movement, which paralysed the country in 2018?

Two informal social revolt movements have been stirring France for several months.

Read it.

Don’t blame them a bit. Go where you’re treated best.

Read it.

A fast-food hamburger chain long associated with California is moving its headquarters out of the Democrat-led state, according to its owner.

In-N-Out owner Lynsi Snyder said she was moving the company to the suburbs of Nashville, Tennessee, with plans for southeastern expansion.

“There’s a lot of great things about California, but raising a family is not easy here. Doing business is not easy here,” Snyder told Allie Beth Stuckey on the “Relatable” podcast released Friday.

Time to leave.

Read it.

It’s not enough to say they hated Trump. That’s the surface-level distraction they fed the public – tweets, tone, ego. But behind closed doors, the political elite weren’t clutching their pearls over Trump’s behavior. They were panicking over what he might expose…

The effort to sabotage Trump’s presidency—before he even took office—was not about protecting democracy. It was about protecting the machine.

From George H.W. Bush to Barack Obama, the same interconnected network of intelligence operatives, political dynasties, and global financial interests built and maintained a shadow system of power. Trump threatened to bring it all into the light.

Two Democrats, two RINOs, four tools of the Deep State.

offGuardian.

Any group of human beings who are supposedly in a free society and who have a leader (or a council of people who lead), assigned by that group to make decisions for the common interests of the group, must rely on their own “self-regulation,” above and beyond the leaders’ government, in order to survive.
This is imperative as a “check and balance” criterion for a healthy society.
In most democratic societies this is done through the elective process. People are put into power, and taken out of power if need be, through elections, i.e., the popular vote. The people have to keep a keen eye on what is happening in their communities, at the local level, and in their nations, at a national level. And of course, they must exercise due diligence concerning global happenings as well. Only then will they know who to vote for that best serves their community.
This is how we have control, albeit sometimes not enough, of our government. We have little control over non-government organizations (NGOs) through the elective process. But we do have control, again to some degree, on social norms, moralities, values, and other things that may grate against our own “community standards” as a mass, through protest and other demands for accountability. In this regard, our society is somewhat kept in check through a nation’s constitutional requirements, as well as our personal assertion as to what is “right” and what is “wrong.”
Human beings have traditionally been on the same page with some of these very basic tenets. For example, there are very few cultures, if any, that advocate, as a foundational tenet, murder. Very few, if any, that advocate child sexual abuse, or physical abuse (of course, what determines either one of these things can be rather subjective.)
Regardless of the outliers always present when making sweeping statements (which certainly there are, and a discussion of these outliers would take enormous time and attention), human beings share many fundamental tenets of “good humanness.”
Unless, of course, they are pushed away from these fundamental tenets by some external force—corrupt government, con men, evil…Satan. Some will say we have a natural tendency to turn to amoral ways (think Moses stepping out for a moment to collect the Ten Commandments and what then ensued).

As economics is essentially about trade, politics is essentially about morality.

New York Post.

A new study scrambles the long-held belief that eggs are bad for your heart, finding that eating a certain number daily might actually improve your cholesterol levels.

But it’s not all sunny side up. While one breakfast staple has been eggsonerated, researchers warn that another could spell serious trouble for your ticker.

Eggs are a nutritional powerhouse, packed with vitamins, minerals, antioxidants, protein and healthy fats. But they’ve long been in the hot seat because they’re naturally high in dietary cholesterol.

For years, health officials and medical groups have recommended limiting egg consumption, concerned it could raise blood cholesterol levels and increase the risk of cardiovascular disease — the leading cause of death in the US.

“Eggs have long been unfairly cracked by outdated dietary advice,” Dr. Jon Buckley, a professor at the University of South Australia and lead researcher on the study, said in a statement.

FOLLOW THE SCIENCE! … until it changes….

The Wall Street Journal, unfortunately nowadays a Voice of the Crust.

“I’m on my way out,” said Bassim Haidar, a Nigerian-born Lebanese businessman who moved here in 2010. “There comes a time when you don’t feel welcome anymore, and it’s time to just start packing and leaving.”

Haidar is one of the estimated 74,000 who used a centuries-old tax loophole, abolished in April, that catered to the global rich. The nondomiciled—or non-dom status, as it is known—allowed foreigners living in the U.K. to pay tax only on what they earned domestically. Profits made abroad were ignored unless brought into the U.K.

Beset by high public debt and crumbling infrastructure, the U.K. hoped eliminating non-doms would bring in about $45 billion by 2030. But instead of paying up, wealthy expats are rushing for the exits, sparking questions about whether the effort will raise any money at all.

Funny how that works.

The British experiment has laid bare the difficult politics of taxing the rich. Taxing high earners has become a rallying cry on the left as a solution to income inequality and fraying social-safety nets. Low-tax advocates say taxes on the wealthy are counterproductive, driving away job creators and big spenders.

In the U.S., New York City Democratic mayoral nominee Zohran Mamdani has proposed a “millionaires tax” on New Yorkers making more than $1 million a year, prompting vocal rich people to say they will leave for lower-tax jurisdictions such as Florida or Texas.

One challenge of taxing the wealthy is that they are highly mobile, with houses around the world, private jets and an army of advisers who can sort out visas and bureaucratic paperwork quickly. Jurisdictions such as Dubai, Italy and Monaco have rolled out the red carpet, offering no taxation or structures similar to the U.K.’s old non-dom status.

Politicians think that they can just pass a law and reality will fall in line with it. They have no clue that people react to incentives and oppression by voting with their feet.

Read it.

Greece is set to tighten its migration laws significantly, offering illegal migrants just two options: voluntary return or imprisonment. A new draft law proposed by the conservative government would impose a minimum prison sentence of three years on those who refuse to leave the country.

The Ministry of Migration described the changes as a necessary step to balance the protection of human rights with the enforcement of the rule of law, safeguard social cohesion, and ensure national security. The draft legislation is expected to be submitted to Parliament in Athens in the coming days.

At present, individuals without legal status are typically held in deportation camps, where they may eventually be granted temporary leave. The proposed law would mark a sharp departure from this approach.

Under the draft, prison sentences for unauthorised stay would not be subject to suspension or reduction—except in cases where migrants agree to leave voluntarily, in which case the sentence may be lifted. “From now on, there will be only two paths: return or imprisonment,” the ministry said.

Read it.

If you’re struggling to lose weight, just remove sugar from your diet. I promise you: you’ll be thinner. Even better if you also skip white flour and other ingredients with a high glycemic index. This should be common knowledge by now, but can’t stress it enough.

If you’re fat and continue eating sugar, you’re choosing to be fat. But I can understand why: sugar is addictive. Not only it tastes good, but it also gives you a dopamine reward. But the cravings will go away after a withdrawal period.

Leave out all added sugar. It’s in everything, so you’ll need to be careful. If you want mayonnaise or salad dressing, you’ll have to do it yourself. Olive oil or vinaigrette is a good alternative.

Read it.

“We are unknown to ourselves, we knowers…and there is good reason for this. We have never looked for ourselves—so how are we ever supposed to find ourselves?”¹ Much has changed since the late nineteenth century, when Nietzsche wrote those words. We now look obsessively for ourselves, and we find ourselves in myriad ways. Then we find more ways of finding ourselves. One involves a tool, around which grew a science, from which bloomed a faith, and from which fell the fruits of dogma. That tool is the questionnaire. The science is psychometrics. And the faith is a devotion to self-codification, of which the revelation of personality is the fruit.

Far too many people spend copious amounts of time trying to ‘find themselves’. Bullshit. You are who you are. There is nothing to find. If you need to ‘find yourself’, you’re looking in the wrong place; under the lamp-post because the light is better there.

What these people are looking for is someone they can pretend to be. Most people refuse to deal directly with reality, dealing instead through an artificial construct of who they would like to be (or, more usually, who they would like to appear to be) at second-hand. Cary Grant famously said, “I pretended to be the person I wanted to be until I became that person” No, he didn’t. He just got world-class at pretending–he was, after all, an actor, whose living depended on it.

They have a self-image based on their looking at this constructed image through the eyes of others. Depending on the opinions of others, this self-image is beyond their control and very fragile, easily damaged and almost impossible to repair.

Those who prey on such people are invested in this process and its cultivation, like race-hustler Jesse Jackson leading slum children in a chant of “I AM SOMEBODY!”, nobody involved realizing the fact that if you were actually somebody you wouldn’t have to chant about it.

“Find out who you are and then be that person.” No. Just be the person you are. That person knows what is appropriate to The You That You Are without any effort. If you don’t like what that person does, then fix it, but don’t pretend that you are somebody else.

Curtis Yarvin:

After an energetic start, the Trump administration has started to slow down. The most worrisome trend is its increasing tendency to focus its efforts away from public drama and

If this trend continues, everyone currently in the administration is likely to end up in prison—or at least, spend the rest of their lives in legal meetings. Why? We’ll see in a moment.

Perhaps even worse, the administration has gone through an ugly public breakup with its largest, most energetic, and most creative supporter—who is now threatening to pour his energy into a literal third party, an idea as promising as a butter-fueled rocket.

What is going on? Who are we? What are we doing? Let’s review?

The regime

The current American regime was born in the de facto monarchy of FDR, which after his death became an institutional oligarchy or “meritocracy.”

Critical institutions in this oligarchy are both inside and outside the formal state: agencies, courts and Congress inside the line, nonprofits, press and universities outside the line. The “Deep State” is the body of the regime; the “Cathedral” is its brain. The complex web of financial and procedural connections between brain and body renders the symbolic distinction between “public” and “private” historically nugatory.

Only for-profit corporations are arguably independent of the government. But even they are enmeshed in a web of regulation and press that leaves them generally compliant. A defense contractor is effectively an agency and operates like one. Yet even a social network has no choice but to bend its public mind to the whims of the powers that be. These powers are decentralized powers. They are no less real for that, and much harder to kill.

Beyond this oligarchy, there is nothing. The hotbed of democracy, the Congress, has a 98% incumbency rate and a seniority The monarchical aspect of the old Constitution—the President—is largely symbolic. We saw this vividly when we spent four years with a senile President, without the public noticing or even being told.

The White House is much more than the President. The White House resolves interagency conflicts. Some mechanism is needed to resolve interagency conflicts. But if we assess that these decisions are pretty random anyway, that mechanism could be as easy as a coin toss.

A good test for the reality of political change is whether a man on the street would notice the change, if he didn’t read the newspaper. Using this test, few Americans could tell the difference between a Democratic President and a quarter. Alas, the Presidency is going the way of the old European monarchies, which in many countries have stuck around in symbolic form. There will always be ceremonies, banquets and photo-ops.

In the contest between this oligarchy and democracy, democracy always loses. Not only does public opinion not control the regime—the regime controls public opinion. In most cases, the mind of the ruled class can be counted on to follow the mind of the ruling class, if sometimes with a lag of decades. Fashion flows downward.

Even in cases where the people are stubborn—there is no country where mass immigration has ever been popular—regime ideology prevails at a policy level. And mass immigration is the final solution to the democracy problem. As Bertolt Brecht said: would not it be easier for the government to elect a new people?

The hobbit army

Today’s Republican Party is the voice of democracy, or as some call it “populism.” It exists to oppose the oligarchy. Or perhaps, to appear to oppose the oligarchy.

The spectrum between controlled opposition, ineffective opposition, and weak opposition is hard to measure. But ever since FDR chose Wendell Willkie, a Democrat until six months before the election, as his opponent in 1940, Republicans have been on this spectrum.

While Nixon and Reagan were certainly sincere in their populism, their administrations had no lasting positive effect on the regime—indeed, Nixon is responsible for affirmative action and Reagan for immigration amnesty. Could Democrats have sold these policies?

Trump is different. He started his first administration with enormous roars about crossing the Rubicon. Then he marched up to the Rubicon, sat down and fished.

It is not a healthy place to fish. Clouds of infected mosquitoes rise from this river. Trump spent the whole administration on the defensive. And when he finally fled, the bugs pursued him. The lawfare did not stop until he was elected again.

While the second Trump administration has not crossed the Rubicon or come remotely close, it is not sitting around and fishing. It charged in ankle-deep, momentarily terrifying the mosquitoes—who are at least on the defensive.

Moreover, the new administration even passes the man-on-the-street test—at least if we can believe the reports that deportation has decreased congestion on Los Angeles freeways. Migrants are no longer flooding across the southern border, and the administration may even complete a coast-to-coast fence (albeit cuttable in 90 seconds with an angle grinder).

But except in foreign policy, with the miraculous and almost accidental closure of USAID, no significant damage has been done to the regime. To the contrary: the opportunity to oppose Trump has rejuvenated it.

Four years of a senile President, plus a four-year hangover from the ecstatic great awakening of 2020, had done more damage to the regime than any Republican administration ever. As radical elite perspectives crossed over and went mainstream, they became stale. The regime lost its self-confidence and raison d’etre.

Now, with Trump splashing like a grizzly in the shallows of the Rubicon, not just bellowing loudly but actually doing huge, shocking things— slaying USAID, decimating the Education Department, immuring migrants in a cartoonish “Alligator Alcatraz,” suing even Harvard itself, etc, etc—mere self-defense has brought the regime’s animal spirits back to life.

The elven lords

America in the late 20th century is not divided by class. It is divided by channel. A hobbit is an ABC-NBC-CBS American. An elf is an NPR-PBS American. Left and right are literally the spectrum on your radio dial.

Most elves are “high elves”—faithful believers in the regime, or at least in its ideas. Worshipers of the Cathedral. But in the castles of the elves, nay even in their loftiest temples, new, seditious doctrines are heard. Who knows what face a man wears beneath his cloak?

These are the whispers of the new “dark elves”—from basement-dwelling X anons to the King of X himself. Who are these men—and their age-gap art-ho women? Some call them dorks. In reality, they slay. What do they want? A line from Ernst von Salomon comes to mind: “what we wanted, we did not know. What we knew, we did not want.”

Unfortunately, in Washington, or in any system of power, you are nothing unless you agree with yourself. The tech lords do not agree on anything—except that they disbelieve in everything. But that means they believe in nothing. And there is no flag of nothing.

The great schism

Right now, the opposition forces are in chaos—divided by personal and cultural rifts. Jeffrey Epstein emerges to challenge Adolf Hitler as the world’s most important dead person. Or is he dead? Many Americans are starting to suspect that they will never even know.

When the regime is united and its enemies are divided, it always wins. The regime is always united. The Democrats have perfect discipline. The Republicans have—no idea what they want. Some want this. Some want that. The Democrats all want the same thing—power.

One nice thing about people who just want power: they never take things personally. If you stab them in the ribs, for instance, they will do one of two things: either mercilessly plot to destroy you, or smile and wish you a nice day. There is no useful option in between. But try explaining this to some great elven lord who has not in decades felt the shiv’s prick?

Actually, the lord was not even touched. But one of his men was stabbed, brutally, in an alley—by some Neanderthal from the lowbrow faction that I’ve taken to calling the “Presidential Retard Caucus.” The Caucus, like all power players, loves to show its strength. The stabbed man? A homosexual. A Protestant. Something like that. Did it matter? He was the lord’s retainer. The lord was obliged to beef.

This sense of reciprocal loyalty is absolutely essential in the feudal world of the elf-barons. In Washington? If you want loyalty, get a dog. People get stabbed. It happens. Idk maybe hire him yourself.

This attitude, completely normal in the reptile enclosure of DC, where betrayal is oxygen, is completely despicable on the savannah of Silicon Valley, where loyalty is life. Without loyalty, a large organization cannot execute as if it was a single institution. Washington cannot execute, because it is not really an organization—just a pit of snakes.

If your goal is to clean up a snakepit, though, you have to learn the ways of the snake. If you need power, not for the usual self-indulgent and onanistic reasons, but because there is some important problem which power is needed to solve: learn from the masters of power. That their reasons are not yours makes them

In general, the pattern of elf-lord failures in Washington is that they fail these types of “shit tests.” Lacking either an instinct or a doctrine for what to do when they get stabbed in the ribs, they yell, cry, complain, run away, fight, etc. To the experienced snakes in the pit, these responses all say the same thing: you are not a snake. This is a pit of snakes. You do not belong here.

And the elves are completely devoid of positive ideas. No one has ever taught them the ancient art of statesmanship. They can think only of cutting budgets.

Not that the hobbits are innocent in this schism! They are anything but innocent. Fundamentally, the hobbit is living in a dream—a kind of virtual Shire, superimposed on his senses by augmented reality, over the grim rotting Yookay that is everywhere around him. America has its own Yookay, with a helot class that speaks Spanish and not Urdu. Does he want the truth? He can’t handle the truth!

Even when the hobbit sees that he is not living in Norman Rockwell America, he is never far from the idea that “acting as if” will get it back. Hobbit politics is fundamentally a form of “manifesting.” Because this cargo-cult creed is incoherent and fake, any situation in which hobbit politicians are making actual decisions will be mercurial and unpredictable. In fact, as happened in February 2020, the high elves may have to turn their platform on a dime (“we have always been at war with Eastasia”) to navigate the hobbits’ mercurial turn.

How can these groups knit themselves into a single effective political force? I despair. Everyone despairs. And—

The brutal future

“I have seen the future,” sang Leonard Cohen, “and it’s murder.”

The staffers in the Trump administration have not quite absorbed the full reality of their predicament. Like Duke Leto in Arrakis, everyone in the administration—from Trump himself on down—is in a trap.

They have one and only one way to stay out of the jaws of this trap: *never lose another election*.

What most Trump staffers don’t realize is that, in the next Democratic administration, lawfare will be *industrialized*. Everyone who worked for the administration, everyone who took money from the administration, will be targeted. Think there aren’t enough prosecutors? There will be enough prosecutors. Thousands of trespassers were targeted after January 6. Trump appointees are not technically trespassing, but the principle is the same. When swine enter the temple, a great purification is necessary. This purification calls for blood—your blood.

The executive branch? No such thing. Everyone in every job in every agency has a mission which is defined by law. Didn’t follow the letter and/or spirit (either will do) of the law? You broke the law. And was there a budget involved? Uh huh. Thought so. You’re an embezzler. You’re a thief. To protect the public—you need to be in jail. You broke the law. This is America. Break the law—go to jail. Criminal! Thief!

The problem with the second Trump administration is that they’ve actually gotten their feet wet in the Rubicon. Like the crowds on January 6—this may not be effective opposition, but it is certainly not controlled opposition. Or at least, the control could be improved.

Steve Graham:

I know the feeling.