Watch it.

Kate the Opera Singer looks behind the curtain to explain something that *I* have always wondered about (and maybe you have, too).

To be fair, staccato languages like German (e.g. Mozart or Wagner) are easier to understand when opera-sung than mush-mouth languages like French (e.g. Gounod or Bizet). Italian and Spanish can go either way, depending on the composer (I can understand what’s going on in a Mozart Italian opera easier than what is going on in the work of somebody like Rossini or Puccini). But maybe that’s just me.

And don’t get me started on Russian opera….

Read it.

It’s natural to feel anxious as we approach the inevitable automation of all human labor. Economic theory suggests that full automation will cause wages to collapse, potentially below subsistence level: the bare minimum needed to sustain human life.

Yet the full automation of the economy will probably also make most people vastly better off. Plummeting wages will coincide with sharply rising standards of living, rapid medical progress, and an explosion in the variety of goods and services that people can choose from.

This may appear paradoxical. How can people prosper even as their wages collapse?

The answer lies in recognizing that wages are just one source of income. People also earn income from investments, collect rent from property, and receive government transfers like pensions or welfare payments.

Today, the majority of people get most of their income by selling their labor. This is what makes wages a good proxy for the standard of living in a given region—at the moment. But full automation will break this pattern. Future humans will likely have low wages, yet they’ll command vastly greater wealth and wield far superior technology than we do today.

To get a glimpse into what this future may look like, it helps to first understand how similar technological revolutions have unfolded in the past.

The American Mind.

The assassination of Charlie Kirk puts to rest the dreamy hope that President Trump’s 2024 election was the final word on identity politics in America. The revolutionary faction he defeated at the ballot box walks not by argument, but by faith. It is a faith that the innocent victims of the world cannot rest until the racists, misogynists, homophobes, transphobes, Islamophobes, extremists, fascists, authoritarians, Nazis—and now the (Israeli) colonizers—are purged.

For more than a decade, we called this faith “cancel culture.” But cancellation was never going to be enough. In the end, the dark inner logic of identity politics requires a literal purging of those identified as “toxins” from the body social. Identity politics is, as I have written, “the spiritual eugenics of our age.” To achieve this always-receding goal of purity, a scapegoat must be found upon whom to lay the sins of the world. Charlie Kirk became that scapegoat.

The Republican political victory of 2024 notwithstanding, identity politics remains the reigning theodicy in all of our public American institutions; it is the established church of the American elite, whose parishioners rage and mock the majority of impure American citizens, who themselves are awakening to its bloody logic. One America mourns a martyr for Christ. Another America celebrates the purging of a scapegoat.

What HE said….

Read it.

Animal rights group PETA issued a statement following the crash, calling the escape a clear example of what it described as the risks of the “greedy monkey experimentation industry.”

I’ll bet you didn’t know that there even was a ‘monkey experimentation industry.’

The original article said that all of the monkey’s but one had been ‘euthanized’, suggesting that one had been held back for interrogation. Fortunately, that appears not to be the case.

When life gives you lemons, monetize!

Read it.

An 18-year-old transgender teen has admitted to plotting a school shooting at an Indiana high school on Valentine’s Day, reports the IndyStar.

Trinity J. Shockley, 18, who is being held in the Morgan County Jail in Martinsville, Indiana, without bond, will plead guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit murder, a Level 2 felony, according to court documents.

Shockley’s attorney is requesting the teen serve no more than 12.5 years in jail and no more than five years on probation as part of the plea agreement.

Read it.

Historically, cities in industrializing countries were often identified with the things they produced. Manchester is where they made textiles, Pittsburgh is where they made steel, and Detroit is where they made cars. These urban identities weren’t confined to heavy manufacturing: New York is synonymous with finance, Los Angeles with movies, and Milan with luxury goods. Nor has the tendency to identify urban areas with specific economic activities fully disappeared: Today, the Bay Area is where they write software and Taipei is where they fabricate semiconductors.

These are all examples of what the sociologist Max Weber called, in a 1921 article The City, 1 producer cities: urban areas organized economically around some specific trade or particular manufactured goods that could be exported to other areas.

In contrast to these producer cities are what Weber called consumer cities. These were places organized economically around a specific set of residents with rights or privileges to some stream of income, like land rents or taxes. Weber used historical Beijing, which was centered on government officials, and Moscow, centered on landowners collecting rents from peasants, as examples. A contemporary example is Dubai, which grew rapidly around oil revenues. 2

Weber attributed the economic development of Europe relative to Asia to the predominance of its producer cities. The advantage he posited wasn’t because producer cities were necessarily larger?—?Beijing was perhaps 10 times as large as Manchester on the eve of the industrial revolution?—?but because producer cities had a higher capacity for innovation. They were dynamic.

Because producer cities are dependent on trade with other cities or countries, they have more incentive to innovate to gain market share. Consumer cities, on the other hand, are more likely to rely on rent seeking?—?and therefore experience economic stagnation. Moreover, innovations in one producer city can spill over to other producer cities through supply chains (cheaper steel in Pittsburgh makes for cheaper cars in Detroit)?—?but anything that benefits a consumer city likely comes at the expense of another city or region (like higher rents for agricultural tenants).

The better keyboard layout your fingers already know.

I would dearly love to learn a more efficient way of typing. The Dvorak and Colemak keyboards are very attractive, but the problem is that one doesn’t type consciously but rather reflexively–kinesthetic or muscle memory is the key. Once you train your fingers on a system, you literally don’t have to think about it, but ‘let your fingers do the typing’. Re-training my fingers to that degree of virtuosity would mean losing my facility with an ordinary QWERTY keyboard; that’s fine if all I do is work with my new keyboard layout, but I’m screwed if I have to go back to using the keyboard layout that everybody else uses.

I’m going to try this new method and see how it works.

Let us count our blessings every day.

Read it.

It is easy to say, “Nuclear should be regulated more sensibly!” But what if you had a blank slate to redo all nuclear fission regulation? How would you harness the power of fission while keeping the public safe?

There are two paths I find interesting. I’m sure there are many more possibilities, but I chose these because they also help explain a lot of the difficulty (and promise) in regulating fission power plants.

Read it.

Bukele is now a verb. To ‘Bukele’ something is to fix a problem that liberals say is ‘too complicated’ by simply ignoring their long-winded excuses and just doing the obvious. It is named after the leader of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele, who has turned a country that was once dubbed the murder capital of the world into one of the safest.

Meanwhile, Britain, once Europe’s most orderly nation, is mired in rape gangs, knife crime, and shoplifting. The UK doesn’t need Bukele-style mega-prisons, but it certainly needs his clarity.

The problem is that our elites in Westminster have mastered the art of inaction, cloaking their cowardice in excuses about complexity and human rights. They wring their hands over ‘systemic’ issues, treat illegal migration like an unsolvable cosmic mystery, and turn a blind eye to the mass rape of British girls in the name of diversity.

Read it.

2025 has been a great year for noticing things that would have gotten one censored, canceled, or debanked just a few short years ago.

In today’s episode, former DOE nuclear engineer Matt Von Swol notices something that’s been floating around for years; the insane number of minorities (mexicans and blacks) who are booked as “WHITE” when they get arrested – something which obviously manipulates ‘inconvenient’ crime stats – something that TPUSA’s Andrew Kolvet noted have been “widely corrupted to serve a racist agenda.’

“I searched through thousands of arrests in my county and every single Hispanic individual who has been arrested is labelled as “WHITE”” Van Swol posted on X.

“Latino”, like “Muslim”, is not a “race” as most people understand the term.

Read it.

We used to play this game in graduate school: find one, lose one. Find one referred to finding a lost ancient text, something that we know existed at one time because other ancient sources talk about it, but which has been lost to the ages. What if someone was digging somewhere in Egypt and found an ancient Greco-Roman trash dump with a complete copy of a precious text – which one would we wish into survival? Lose one referred to some ancient text we have, but we would give up in some Faustian bargain to resurrect the former text from the dead. Of course there is a bit of the butterfly effect; that’s what made it fun. As budding classicists, we grew up in an academic world where we didn’t have A, but did have B. How different would classical scholarship be if that switched? If we had had A all along, but never had B? For me, the text I always chose to find was a little-known pamphlet circulated in the late fourth century by a deposed Spartan king named Pausanias. It’s one of the few texts about Sparta written by a Spartan while Sparta was still hegemonic. I always lost the Gospel of Matthew. It’s basically a copy of Mark, right down to the grammar and syntax. Do we really need two?

What would you choose? Consider that Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey are only two of the poems that make up the eight-part Epic Cycle. Or that Aristotle wrote a lost treatise on comedy, not to mention his own Socratic dialogues that Cicero described as a ‘river of gold’. Or that only eight of Aeschylus’s estimated 70 plays survive. Even the Hebrew Old Testament refers to 20 ancient texts that no longer exist. There are literally lost texts that, if we had them, would in all likelihood have made it into the biblical canon.

Read it.

Michael LaRosa, who served as former first lady Jill Biden’s press secretary, said Friday the demolition of the White House’s East Wing was “probably needed.”

“It’s sad. I had a really wonderful office that I squatted in an hour or two after the inauguration ended, and remained there for nearly two years,” LaRosa said during an appearance on “The Sunrise on The Hill.”

“It’s heartbreaking, and I’m sentimental about it and sad,” LaRosa said. “At the same time, I think every first family, every president, should play a role in evolving the White House and updating it and modernizing it and sometimes expanding it.”

Donors for Trump’s $300m White House ballroom include Google, Apple and Palantir (The Guardian)

A Pile of Rubble: After 123 Years, the East Wing Is Gone (Elisabeth Bumiller/New York Times)

The Ballroom and the Bubbles ??? As shocking as it’s been to see the innards of the East Wing this week … (Meghan Houser/The Contrarian)

White House Stops Press From Documenting Trump’s Disaster Renovation (Hafiz Rashid/New Republic)

All The Donors Financing Trump’s Ballroom As He Demolishes The White House (HuffPost)

A Virginia couple is asking a judge to block Trump from tearing up the East Wing (Josh Gerstein/Politico)  Too late.

Interior Dept to Reuse Dirt From WH Ballroom Build

THE DUMBEST CYCLE: The Legacy Nightlies Are Still Covering the Ballroom Build Like It’s Watergate

White House Makeover: Trump’s Big Ballroom Blitz

D.C.’s newest tourist attraction is a demolition site. (Yeah, that one.) (Paul Schwartzman/Washington Post)

Shock — the White House is still there (Hugo Gurdon/Washington Examiner)

Chelsea Clinton: WH Rennovation a ‘Wrecking Ball to Our Heritage’  What little we have left after the efforts of your parents.

Trump is wrecking the People’s House | Exclusive (Chelsea Clinton/USA Today)

Big Tech Helped Bankroll the East Wing Destruction (Tim Murphy/Mother Jones)

Fmr. White House Usher: Build the Ballroom

Kooky Leftist Actor Claims ‘Heartbreaking’ East Wing Demo Is Distraction From…Epstein?

Trump demolishes the East Wing — and White House norms (MSNBC)  “Norms”, of couse, meaning “The way Democrats always did things.”

LiveScience.

For about seven minutes in 2003, scientists reversed extinction.

The resurrected lineage was the Pyrenean ibex (Capra pyrenaica pyrenaica), and the last known member of the subspecies, a female named Celia, had died three years earlier.

Scientists had collected DNA from Celia’s ear before her death and injected her genetic material into a domesticated goat egg cell with its nucleus removed. The resulting clone — the first and only extinct creature to have been revived at the time — died soon after birth due to a lung defect.

Read it.

Ted Nordhaus deserves a nod for doing what few in the climate establishment ever do: admitting he was wrong. In his essay “I Thought Climate Change Would End the World. I Was Wrong” (The Free Press, Oct. 19, 2025), Nordhaus concedes that his worldview “was built on apocalyptic models sprung from faulty assumptions”. That sentence alone marks a watershed moment in the long, strange saga of climate alarmism. It’s rare to see one of the movement’s own architects confess that its foundations were exaggerated, its projections implausible, and its tone hysterical.

Nordhaus co-founded the Breakthrough Institute, an organization that has long tried to make climate activism sound reasonable by marrying environmental rhetoric to talk of innovation and modernization. For years, he and his colleagues accepted the central dogma—that the planet faced an existential crisis unless humanity swiftly abandoned fossil fuels. They were not content to question the science; they amplified it. “The heating of the earth,” Nordhaus once wrote in 2007, “will cause the sea levels to rise and the Amazon to collapse and… trigger a series of wars over basic resources like food and water”.

Now, almost two decades later, he confesses that such scenarios were never plausible. The old models assumed “high population growth, high economic growth, and slow technological change”—a trifecta of contradictions that cannot coexist. He points out that fertility rates are falling, economies are decarbonizing on their own, and technological progress accelerates efficiency regardless of political slogans. His admission is blunt: “I no longer believe this hyperbole.”

Read it.

Switzerland has announced a significant tightening of travel restrictions for asylum seekers. Under a new decision by the government, such individuals will generally no longer be allowed to travel to their home countries or to other states.

…

Austrian right-wing party FPÖ called the Swiss decision “absolutely right,” adding that “those seeking protection certainly do not need to travel to the country from which they are seeking protection.”

If you can go back to the country from which you are requesting ‘asylum’, do you really need asylum? Survey says: NO.

Read it.

Russia secretly acquired Western technology between 2013 and 2024 to build an underwater surveillance system in the Arctic designed to protect its nuclear submarine fleet, according to an investigation published Thursday by The Washington Post in collaboration with European news organizations.

According to financial records, court documents and Western security officials, Russia purchased sonars, underwater robots, and fiber-optic cables as well as research vessels and other sophisticated technology worth more than $50 million from companies including Norwegian defense giant Kongsberg, Japanese tech conglomerate NEC and U.S. sonar manufacturer EdgeTech to build a sensor surveillance system dubbed “Harmony.”

Purchases were also made from companies in Sweden, Italy, the United Kingdom and other NATO member countries.

The New York Times, paper of record for the Crust.

n the outskirts of Wyoming’s capital, two advertisements about a minute apart offered starkly different paths.

A nonprofit group’s billboard promoted a way to earn money for college. The other, from Walmart, dangled pay exceeding $30 an hour.

The dueling choices underscored a fundamental tension for the nation’s teenagers and adults alike, one that has become vivid in the Trump era: Is college something all Americans need?

For decades, it was close to an article of faith among education leaders, scholars and politicians, regardless of political ideology, that most people should go to college. But in many places, most jobs do not require college degrees, and doubts over the value of higher education have metastasized as student debt has soared and the ranks of dropouts have grown.

College has become a sharp dividing line in American life, and the disconnect between higher education’s promises and its sometimes-frustrating reality has helped fuel a conservative movement to upend academia. Over the last decade, though, nearly every state tried to get more people to earn a certificate or a degree after high school.

Read it.

On the afternoon of March 8, a petroleum tanker named Torm Agnes entered the Port of Ensenada on Mexico’s Pacific coast carrying almost 120,000 barrels of diesel.

Such a vessel was a rare sight in that port, which mainly hosts cruise liners, luxury yachts, and container ships. Ensenada lacks the infrastructure needed to unload cargos of flammable hydrocarbons safely – making what happened later that day odder still.

Waves of fuel-hauling trucks rolled up to the dock to cart away much of the Torm Agnes’ load. Workers scurried about filling the vehicles’ cavernous tanks, up to six at a time, using hoses springing from a larger hosepipe affixed to the vessel. The operation, while risky, ran like clockwork, according to an eyewitness and a photo and video from the scene shared with Reuters.

Read it.

A man was taken into custody late Tuesday after driving his car into a security barrier outside the White House, authorities said.

The U. S. Secret Service said the man crashed into the security gate at a White House entrance at 10:37 p.m. Tuesday. The man was immediately arrested by officers from the Secret Service’s uniformed division, the agency said.

Investigators searched his car and deemed it to be safe, Secret Service officials said in a statement.

Read it.

A new national poll finds that 40% of Americans say illegal immigrants should be deported even if they have not committed any offense beyond entering the country illegally — a sign of firm public backing as President Donald Trump fulfills his border policy promises.

At least in the text they specify “beyond entering the country illegally” WHICH IS A CRIME. But you wouldn’t know that from just the headline. That’s how far the mind-rot has spread.

A new survey by The Economist and YouGov shows that immigration remains one of the most divisive issues among voters.

The poll found that 38% said illegal immigrants should be allowed to stay only if they meet certain requirements, while 14% said they should be allowed to stay without conditions; 8% were unsure.

Associated Press, a Voice of the Crust.

When the Deep State is wounded, the Narrative Media squeal.

The essence of democracy, as Jonah Goldberg once said, is that 51% of the people get to pee in the soup of 49% of the people, without recourse. The chief drawback to letting the people’s representatives vote on stuff is that sometimes they will vote in ways that the Smartest People In The Room think are stupid.

Read it.

Legal documents are notoriously difficult to understand, even for lawyers. This raises the question: Why are these documents written in a style that makes them so impenetrable?

MIT cognitive scientists believe they have uncovered the answer to that question. Just as “magic spells” use special rhymes and archaic terms to signal their power, the convoluted language of legalese acts to convey a sense of authority, they conclude.

In a study appearing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the researchers found that even non-lawyers use this type of language when asked to write laws.

“People seem to understand that there’s an implicit rule that this is how laws should sound, and they write them that way,” says Edward Gibson, an MIT professor of brain and cognitive sciences and the senior author of the study.

Eric Martinez Ph.D. is the lead author of the study. Francis Mollica, a lecturer at the University of Melbourne, is also an author of the paper.

Good catch. What they call “center-embedding” may stem from the fact that in European countries many had laws that originated in Roman legal codes that were written in Latin. Latin can say many things more concisely and unambiguously than English (and Greek has the same advantage over Latin)(and Syriac has the same advantage over Greek),

Many fantasy stories that use magic require that magical incantations be uttered in a foreign (preferably ancient) language. Jim Butcher’s Harry Dresden novels have a lot of fun with this.

Richard Hanania.

Ideally, one would like to think that if someone has written a 300-page book, it means that they have 300 pages worth of things to say. My experience is that is rarely the case. People generally have an idea that can be expressed in terms much shorter than that, but extending your idea into a book looks impressive on a CV and gets you invited on TV shows and podcasts.

To take one example, the last book I finished was David Sinclair’s Lifespan. It has three parts, and the last of them is nothing but two chapters about his political and social views, where he addresses issues that are ancillary to conquering aging like what’s going to happen to social security and the impact of a growing population on global warming. He also comes out for universal healthcare, legalized euthanasia, and more income equality.

There is no particular reason that the world’s foremost expert on aging should be expected to have anything new or interesting to say on these topics, and he doesn’t. I would’ve skipped these chapters, except for the fact that I was planning on writing a book review and felt obligated to slog through them. It’s not that a professor at Harvard Medical School can’t have interesting political views, it’s that Sinclair’s opinions are a boring mélange of what one would find across Atlantic think pieces. But for some reason he feels the need to pontificate on various topics that have nothing to do with his area of expertise.

Why? Most likely, he’s simply filling up space. Either he thought the book needed some padding, or maybe he felt the urge to preach about single-payer healthcare and decided to trap readers into hearing his views after he lured them in with the anti-aging stuff.

Read it.

Finally! I’ve been talking about molten salt nuclear reactors for 10 years at least. They burn waste, and they can’t melt down. The small amount of waste they produce turns to lead in decades, not centuries. Operating at low pressure makes for a simpler system. They can be small and modular or city size. Makes so much sense, and we are finally building them in the USA. Spend money on this, not stupid things like wind “farms.”

The Foundry.

The plight of corporate diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) jobs is only getting worse as the Trump administration’s crackdown takes hold, new employment research shows.

As of September, job postings for diversity roles have plunged roughly 50% from pre-pandemic levels, falling to about 1,500 this year, according to Revelio Labs data reported by Bloomberg. By comparison, DEI-related postings nearly quadrupled in 2022, reaching approximately 10,000.

When President Donald Trump took office in January, DEI job postings were about 6% above 2019 levels, according to the outlet.

The New York Times, a Voice of the Crust.

He was drawn to times and places where the status rules were shifting. His book “The Right Stuff,” about the U.S. space program, takes place at such a moment. Before, the combat pilots were the tippy-top alpha males in the world of flight, but then along came the astronauts to knock them off their perch. In “Radical Chic,” you can catch glimpses of the old blue-blood Protestant elite — the Astors, the Whitneys, the Rockefellers. But this is 1970. A new crowd is beginning to displace them: the Bernsteins, Barbara Walters. The members of this rising elite have often made their money in culture and the media, and include the formerly unthinkables — Catholics, Jews, Black people.

The old aristocrats had it so easy, those stately bankers in the J.P. Morgan mold. They may have been frequently bewildered about why the masses didn’t like them, but their own place in the social aristocracy was secure. It was right there in their bloodlines — the generations of grandees stretching back centuries. The status rules were simple. All you had to do was live like an English earl and collect European culture by the boatload, and you could cruise through Manhattan amid the sound of others bowing and scraping.

The members of the new cultural elite could never be so secure. Their status — their very reason for being — was based on their own superior sensibility. They lived by their wits and their public attitudes. These media-age aristocrats had to excel at tasks that members of the beau monde have always excelled at — being rich, thin and well connected; keeping the duplexes adorned with the design trends. But they had to do so much more. They had to be morally avant-garde, able to articulate the luxury opinions du jour. They had to perform all these inversions — rising to the social stratosphere by ostentatiously demonstrating their solidarity with the oppressed, assuring their place atop the structures of power by striking radical poses and pretending to support tearing those structures down. Wolfe was there at the dawn of 20th-century one-downmanship, when you could rise to the social stratosphere by donning peasant and revolutionary garb.

David Brooks, when he’s not engaged in his Pet Conservative dog-and-pony show, is actually a pretty good writer.

Not as good as Tom Wolfe, of coures … nobody is … but still pretty good.

Read it.

By the time you read this essay, no matter the hour of the day, you will likely have already made some kind of choice: coffee with skimmed milk, whole milk, cream, or black? Sugar or no sugar? Tea instead? Personalised, preference-based choice is, at present, a deeply familiar aspect of life in much of the world, though perhaps most markedly so in the United States, where I live and work. It is also something people don’t generally spend a lot of time discussing, in part because it feels so ordinary. People around the globe shop for everything from housing to vacations to, yes, caffeinated drinks. They pick what they want to read, what they want to listen to, and what they want to believe. They vote for favourite candidates for office. They select friends and lovers, fields to study, professions and jobs, places to live, even insurance plans to hedge their bets when something they cannot choose occurs.

Perusing a menu of options to decide what best matches individual desires and values – which is what we generally mean today by making a choice – is a key feature of modern democratic and consumer culture alike. It is also an exalted one. People may disagree about what the possibilities should be, but rarely about the principle of maximising arenas for choice-making or the options themselves. For many of the world’s citizens, this is simply what freedom feels like.

Yet, as you may have also felt at various moments, abundant choice isn’t always so straightforward. Behavioural economists point out that most people are actually pretty bad at making decisions of this kind (which explains the appeal of return departments and divorces for when things don’t go as hoped). Philosophers and political theorists say it promotes selfish individualism and discourages collective action around issues that affect us all. And sociologists add that societies that prize choice too much tend to blame those with only poor or limited options for their own misfortunes. So much for choice as consistently synonymous with freedom.

Read it.

My, what a surprise.

Read it.

The Europe that the monk Raoul Glaber saw with pride at the dawn of the year 1000, covered with “a white mantle of churches,” has entered a dark era of de-Christianisation. Church towers gave way to minarets, and city churches, gradually falling into disuse, were at best converted into trendy bars or contemporary art exhibition halls—when they were not destroyed once and for all. And what of the monasteries, those spacious buildings that once housed cohorts of monks whose prayers, recited from dawn to dusk, set the rhythm of the days and seasons in the countryside?

Today, many of them are real estate complexes that have become useless. The monks are ageing and are going to end their days in medical care facilities that have only a very distant relationship with stained glass windows and ribbed vaults.

And yet, there are still communities in France that continue to speak to young people and are capable not only of erecting walls and building new monasteries, but also of restoring ancient walls threatened with abandonment.

Read it.

Today is the day that the forces of goodness and righteousness and correct pronouns take our country back from the twisted fascist psychopath who is exerting his despotic rule over us.

To demonstrate how widespread and deep the support for the No Kings movement is, it’s worth noting that today’s event in Minneapolis is sponsored by the local chapter of the U.S. Communist Party.

Based on the previous iteration of the event back in June, the occasion will largely be a Boomer affair, staffed by geezers in my age group doddering (or riding their mobility scooters) down the street carrying signs.

However, in major leftist citadels such as Portland, Antifa is urging the cadres to infiltrate the No Kings rallies and “show them what antifascism really looks like.” So the day may turn sporky in some zip codes.

Read it.

Though much may separate Thucydides, Xenophon, Ephorus, Plato, and Aristotle from one another, on this fundamental point they and those who subsequently followed their lead were agreed: that to come to understand a polity, one must be willing to entertain two propositions.

First, one must presume that the form of government, the constitution, the rules defining membership in the políteuma or ruling order is the chief determinant of a political community’s character. Second, one must assume that pa?deía, which is to say, education and moral formation in the broadest and most comprehensive sense, is more important than anything else in deciding the character of a particular pol?teía. In one passage of The Politics, Aristotle suggests that it is the provision of a common pa?deía—and nothing else—that turns a multitude into a unit and constitutes it as a pól?s; in another, he indicates that it is the pol?teía which defines the pól?s as such. Though apparently in contradiction, these two statements are in fact equivalent—for, as the peripatetic recognized, man is an imitative animal, the example we set is far more influential than what we say, and it is the “distribution and disposition of offices and honors [táx?s t?ˆn arch?ˆn]” constituting the políteuma of a given polity that is the most effective educator therein.

For anyone interested in information technology, a study of the classics (Latin, Greek, and their associated cultures) would be very rewarding. It certainly worked for me.

Bloomberg,  a Voice of the Crust.

Vanderbilt University is asking local Florida officials to approve its proposal to build a $520 million campus in the wealthy Palm Beach area, tapping into a growing region transformed by new outposts of financial firms.

Follow the money!

The Nashville-based school envisions buildings totaling 300,000 square feet for 1,000 students and more than 100 faculty. The site in West Palm Beach was previously targeted by the University of Florida for a similar project that ultimately failed.

After all, who wouldn’t rather have a degree from Vanderbilt than from the University of Florida?

The first step took place this week. Vanderbilt officials asked West Palm Beach to donate city and county land for the campus. West Palm Beach is located on the mainland, directly across the Intracoastal Waterway from mansion-lined Palm Beach.

Very convenient for Children of the Crust.

A shortage of elite school options — from kindergarten to college — has been a major sticking point for a wave of younger wealthy families who’ve moved to South Florida from New York, California and elsewhere to work at firms such as Ken Griffin’s Citadel, Blackstone Inc. and Goldman Sachs Group Inc. And there’s a dearth of top-tier universities to build up talent to feed those firms.

What a drag!

Read it.

Have you ever heard the saying, “Slow is smooth, smooth is fast?” It’s a mantra deeply ingrained in Navy SEALs operations. A counterintuitive concept that flips our usual understanding of speed and efficiency on its head.

Picture this: you’re part of an elite team executing high-stakes missions under extreme pressure. There’s no room for error, but there’s also urgency – every second counts. You feel the urge to rush. But what if running only leads to mistakes?

This phrase isn’t just about being slow or fast; it’s about finding a rhythm that balances precision and pace, ultimately leading to swifter progress. The SEALs swear by it… but how can we apply it beyond military contexts?

I got your attention, didn’t I? Let’s dive deeper into the roots of this idea and understand why taking it slow can be critical.

It is an elementary principle of most martial arts that one starts out practicing move slowly to get correct form, and then gradually increases speed once the muscle-brain connection is firm.

Read it.

Prices for housing are already at a record high, because of a pervasive long-term structural housing shortage in America. Since 2022, interest rates have increased, so homeowners with a locked in low mortgage rate don’t want to sell their homes and move, the result being fewer existing homes on the market. One would think that the response would simply be to build more housing, especially on the cheap end. And yet, that’s not happening. The traditional “starter home” for a young family just doesn’t exist anymore.

Technology exacerbates many problems. Just as in the current age all hot-looking girls leave their hometowns to move Las Vegas, Los Angeles, or Miami, local housing markets are being more and more subsumed into regional or even national markets, as this article relates.

Ars Technica.

Lead exposure sounds like a modern problem, at least if you define “modern” the way a paleoanthropologist might: a time that started a few thousand years ago with ancient Roman silver smelting and lead pipes. According to a recent study, however, lead is a much more ancient nemesis, one that predates not just the Romans but the existence of our genus Homo. Paleoanthropologist Renaud Joannes-Boyau of Australia’s Southern Cross University and his colleagues found evidence of exposure to dangerous amounts of lead in the teeth of fossil apes and hominins dating back almost 2 million years. And somewhat controversially, they suggest that the toxic element’s pervasiveness may have helped shape our evolutionary history.

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conquered. The storylines may change, from “this time it’s different” to “the Fed has our back,” but the psychology does not. When markets rise steadily and volatility remains low, investors confuse stability with safety. That’s precisely the illusion forming in markets today. The S&P 500’s relentless climb, paired with suppressed volatility and ample liquidity, has given the impression that downside risk has somehow been engineered out of the system.

This is where the trap begins. Behavioral finance tells us that people respond more to “how” risk feels than to what the data shows. When investors no longer feel anxious, they begin to take risks they wouldn’t otherwise tolerate. Rising prices reinforce optimism, optimism drives more buying, and the cycle continues until the most minor shock shatters the illusion. Low volatility environments create the psychology for instability by suppressing the healthy corrections that usually reset investor expectations. The longer the calm lasts, the more fragile the market becomes beneath the surface.

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A new round of tariff announcements from the Trump administration sent markets reeling, with gold dropping briefly only to soar back to new record highs above $4300 today, signaling collective doubt in the system itself as investors rush to protect themselves with hard assets.

Collectively, markets are reaffirming gold’s role at the center of sovereignty, monetary stability, and global reserve strategy, even as it has become a favorite target of Keyneseian ridicule as everything from a “barbarous relic” to a waste of physical and financial space in investment portfolios and balance sheets.

Yet, confidence in US debt continues to decline, with the “safe” status of Treasuries increasingly being questioned. That’s why now, for the first time in decades, collective central bank gold holdings have surpassed the value of their Treasuries. Central banks now hold 20% of all gold ever mined, protecting themselves from the effects of currency debasement even as they, ironically, cause it. Instead of earning yield by holding Treasuries, they continue stocking up on gold, which is a powerful statement against the results of their own monetary experiments.

“Who cares about money? It’s just dirty pieces of paper.” — Bugsy Siegel

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After 10 years and nearly $1 billion in total project costs, the Barack Obama Presidential Center is finally nearing completion and has been opened for limited public tours. The facility is set to officially go into operation in the spring of 2026, however, at least $230 million in construction costs still remain and the Obama Foundation simply doesn’t have it. Total reserve funds are $116 million and this does not take into account the cost of paying staff to maintain the center.

Not only is the future of the site in limbo, the building is also being called “the tomb” by many locals in the South Side of Chicago where it is located. Though the media frequently refers to the design as “warm and inviting”, it looks more like a concrete bunker nightmare that one might find in Soviet era Russia.

The center’s notably harsh aesthetics are oddly similar to many pieces of architecture constructed in Russia during the height of communism using methods that seem to suck the life out of the surrounding environment. One cannot help but notice the dystopian similarities. Some might ague that buildings can’t really be “political”, but these are people that don’t understand architecture.