The Foundry.

President Donald Trump signed an executive order to end birthright citizenship on his first day back in office in January. Since then, 22 states have sued to block it, sparking debates over whether the Constitution grants citizenship to anyone born on U.S. soil.

“Many people today take it for granted that the answer is ‘yes’: If you’re born on American soil, you’re an American citizen. Period. End of issue. But is that what the Constitution says?” asked Amy Swearer, a senior legal fellow at The Heritage Foundation, in a recent Prager University video examining the legal issues behind birthright citizenship.

While the 14th Amendment says, “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States,” Swearer said that this raises the question, who is born subject to U.S. jurisdiction?

Whatever it means, if they intended to give people born in the U.S. unconditional citizenship, they wouldn’t have included that qualifying clause. So the Woke Narrative is a lie.

Read it.

Germany has deployed a permanent military brigade beyond its borders for the first time since the end of World War II, with troops dispatched to the capital of Lithuania. The event was inaugurated by German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, who said during a military ceremony in Vilnius that “the security of our Baltic allies is also our security.”

The decision is part of a series of actions in recent months by European nations to “bolster defenses” on NATO’s eastern flank amid claims that Russia intends to invade greater Europe if they defeat Ukraine. The “domino theory” remains unfounded and the Kremlin has never threatened to attack any country outside of Ukraine. The move to shift troops to Lithuania places them near the border of Belarus (a Russian ally) and within striking distance of Ukraine or the Russian border.

European governments have been threatening an escalation by eventually moving NATO troops into Ukraine in direct confrontation with Russian forces. Vladimir Putin has previously warned that NATO troops in Ukraine represent a red line which could result in nuclear conflict.

ZMan goes literary.

When you look at lists of the best science fiction movies, what you see is a mix of recency bias and popular nonsense. Star Wars gets placed near the top because the lists are usually targeted to people who consume corporate slop. Back to the Future is another one on these lists that does not qualify as science fiction. It is a comedy where time travel is the MacGuffin. Of course, this raises the question as to what qualifies as science fiction and what makes for good sci-fi.

Science fiction is speculative fiction that relies on science to create scenarios where questions about the human condition are more easily explored. Artificial intelligence, for example, is useful in telling stories about what it means to be human. We instinctively know a computer program is not human, even if it is able to speak with us like a real human being. That gets to the issue of what separates flesh and blood humans from the artificial versions we are creating.

Heinlein said that science fiction takes what we know now, what we thought we knew before now and then speculates about the future based on a solid understanding of how science advances. Asimov famously said that science fiction is about how humans react to changes in science and technology. Together they make for a good definition of science fiction, which is as much about the science as the fiction. In other words, it is not just drama in space or in the future.

Read it.

In 1900, South Asia, East Asia, Central Asia, the Middle East and North Africa were patrilocal and patrilineal, but with one fundamental distinction. Endogamy versus exogamy. South Asians married kin, East Asians did not. This cultural difference may have mediated their responses to economic growth, in turn shaping culture.

I suggest that exogamy motivates an outward orientation for marriage, commerce and cooperation. As exogamous societies undergo economic growth and urbanisation, people seize any and all opportunities to develop ties of trust, intimacy and reciprocity.

Read it.

The lecture that launched geopolitics in the Anglosphere was given 120 years ago, on 25 January 1904, to the Royal Geographical Society in London. The speaker, Halford Mackinder (1861–1947), didn’t invent the term, but did more than anyone else to give the idea currency, not least because he was a leading commentator of the world’s most powerful empire and naval power — two elements that featured so heavily in the concept.

As director of the London School of Economics, Mackinder was a well-connected academic who was also active in politics. He had joined the Conservatives in 1903, having been one of their allied Liberal Unionists. After two unsuccessful attempts to enter Parliament in 1900 and 1909, he was to serve as MP for Glasgow Camlachie from 1910 until 1922.

During Britain’s intervention in the Russian Civil War, he was High Commissioner to (anti-Bolshevik) South Russia in 1919–20. Subsequently, he was chairman of the Imperial Shipping Committee from 1920 to 1945 and chairman of the Imperial Economic Committee between 1925 and 1931.

The contemporary influence of Mackinder’s views is a matter for discussion. Yet the nature of the British state, which then lacked administrative and intellectual institutions for imperial planning and defence, increased the possibilities for ideas from external thinkers to make an impact. The gap was filled by circles of intellectual opinion sustained through meetings in London, including in clubland. Mackinder’s metropolitan milieu was therefore very much an active part of the debate about the power Britain should rightly wield and the anxiety about its ability to do so in a changing world.

“Pay attention to me or I’ll hurt myself!’
“Go ahead, knock yourself out – so to speak.”

The New Neo.

The definition of being a Jew is complicated somewhat by the fact that different strains of Judaism believe that being ethnically Jewish – or part of the Jewish people – is inherited in different ways. The more Orthodox believe that Jewishness involves having a Jewish mother and even if the father is not Jewish the offspring are Jewish (part of the Jewish people) as long as the mother is Jewish. Reform Jews believe Jewishness is passed through either parent.

The legal system of Israel reflects some of this, but Jews outside of Israel aren’t bound by it in any way unless they happen to agree with it anyway. All Jewish denominations around the world reject Messianic Judaism as a form of Judaism in the religious sense. However, Messianic Jews can become Israelis under the right of return – but only if they qualify in terms of ancestry.

Read it.

An estimated 6.2% of U.S. adults and 5.8% of U.S. children – more than 20 million people – have food allergies (Ng and Boersma, 2023; Zablotsky, Black, and Akinbami, 2023). For consumers with food allergies, labels indicating the presence of an allergen in a product can reduce information asymmetry and enhance the safety of purchasing decisions (Simons, et. al, 2005). For producers, however, ensuring that food products with and without major allergens are kept separated in production and distribution can be a significant challenge. The costs associated with mislabeling and cross-contamination, driven by costs of recalls and related civil litigation, can be large (Gupta et al., 2017). Indeed, the current most common reason for recalls of food products in the United States is the incorrect labeling of allergens (Gendel and Zhu, 2013).

For the last two decades, U.S. statutes have required that the presence of any of the “big eight” major allergens – milk, eggs, fish, crustacean shellfish, tree nuts, wheat, peanuts, and soybeans – be clearly labeled on the packaging of food products. Recently, new statutes required the inclusion of a ninth major allergen, sesame, first at a state level (2019) and later at the federal level (passed in 2021 and enacted in 2023).

Strikingly, media reports indicated that some food manufacturers began adding sesame to products that previously did not contain the ingredient following the implementation of the new allergen labeling requirements (Aleccia, 2022; Chatman, 2023; Hughes, et al., 2023). Statements from U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) officials also noted the prevalence of such unexpected responses by producers (Califf, 2023). To our knowledge, however, there has not yet been any systematic examination of food manufacturers’ responses to the regulatory change. To address this gap, we use ingredient label data to evaluate the timing and frequency of firm responses, thus illuminating some of the unintended consequences of the change in allergen labeling requirements for sesame.

The Economist, a Voice of the Crust.

Well, it seems to be all of the Wokerati, Grievance Studies majors, and ‘funding’ leeches that are moving.

Actually, looking at the effects ‘academics’ have had in the last fifty years, that’s a feature, not a bug.

UPDATE College English majors can’t read  But they can deconstruct! And they can interrogate! And they can even hear the dog-whistles!

Read it.

A couple attempting to make friends with wild grizzly bears were viciously mauled to death after making a fatal mistake.

Think of it as evolution in action.

Women who would rather encounter a bear than a man in the woods: Take note.

Evidently the oft-heard advice “I don’t need to outrun the bear, I just need to outrun you” isn’t as useful as supposed.

Props to the girlfriend, though, for going after the bear with a frying pan. (I’d have just said, “Play stupid games, win stupid prizes” and departed the scene. But that’s me.)

ZMan’s weekly podcast. Highly recommended.

This weekend is the official launch of summer in America. It does not feel like the first weekend of summer, but that is probably due to the weather. It has been cool and rainy here for most of spring. Even so, it is the start of the summer season. That means the A-list fabricators will be taking off, leaving the media mendacity to the second string for the next few months. The quality of lies will be low.

It will be interesting to see if the Trump admin maintains the pace. The last four months has been a whirlwind. This week we got the South Africa stuff, which is one of those things that no one thought possible six months ago. The Overton window is moving so quickly it is hard to keep up with it. Now that official Washington is heading off for the summer, it will be interesting to see if the admin takes a break

The other thing to watch for this summer is if the crazies get brought out of storage to riot somewhere. If you scan Bluesky, they are depressed. The money dried up and then the jobs dried up. Now they are left to trade scare stories to one another in the weird echo chamber that is Bluesky. If it is an Orange Man Summer, the fever swamp could be on suicide watch by August.

Read it.

Alberta is set to hold a referendum asking voters if they wish to secede from Canada, with some residents even supporting the idea of becoming America’s 51st state.

Alberta, known as “Canada’s Texas” for its oil-rich economy and conservative-leaning politics, has long felt used by the rest of the country, which gobbles up its wealth in the form of taxes but provides little in return.

President Donald Trump’s regular quips of bringing Canada into U.S. statehood, coupled with the election of yet another left-wing prime minister in Mark Carney, has given a boost to a small but motivated group of secessionists in the province.

That would be amusing.

ZMan:

It was reasonable for the crazies to demand that normal people tolerate the guy in the dress. Tolerance has deep roots in Christian ethics to the point where it is a habit of mind for Western people. The crazies could appeal to that deeply held belief in favor of the pervert. When they demanded that the pervert in the dress have easy access to your kids, then things changed. In the fullness of time, it will be the lurch towards the kids that ended the woke terror.

Book recommendation: Not That Kind of Good Guy (John Ringo)

Read it.

This sort of time flip has been described as looking into a mirror and spotting your back instead of your face. It sounds like science fiction, but it has a basis in real physics.

Researchers had predicted for more than 50 years that sudden shifts in a wave’s environment could trigger such reversals.

Time reflections differ from everyday mirror views in one crucial way. Instead of light or sound bouncing back in space, the wave is forced to reverse its flow in time.

That shift causes the frequency of the wave to change, sparking a chain reaction of interesting phenomena in the system.

In normal reflections, you see an immediate image or hear an echo. A time reflection, on the other hand, makes part of the signal run backward.

There is no need for any speculation about time travel, though, since these effects involve a swift flip in the medium’s physical traits.

Read it.

College officials around the country—including those at some of the most selective (and notoriously left-leaning) schools—have admitted a student’s high school grades and often-obscure extracurricular activities aren’t enough for making admissions decisions.

Now, schools that abandoned use of college entrance exams during the COVID-19 pandemic—schools like Harvard, Johns Hopkins, and MIT—are reinstating the practice.

Read it.

A modern chess engine can easily outplay even the top ranked chess players of the world. It can be useful for practice and even developing new styles of play, but using one in a chess tournament is considered cheating. Such use is considered cheating for the same reason it’s also considered uninteresting: Humans want to watch human feats. To most people these days, a computer playing chess comes off as an extremely computery activity. Everyone understands that chess is a closed – albeit complex – system. Everyone also realizes that a modern computer can make deeper, faster and better predictions than any human is capable of. It isn’t interesting, impressive or entertaining – at least not the same way a 12 year old human chess prodigy is.

A computer that can detect a certain type of disease is of course more interesting and beneficial than a highly competent chess engine, and is going to be accepted by the vast majority of humanity as something good. It’s not cheating, it’s helping. Yet, it’s not much to hang a bunch of hype on: Like with a chess engine, or halfway decent machine translation, it’s simply a computer finally doing one of the many things we’ve always been told they should be able to. A one trick pony, basically just another piece of medical software, more like Word or Excel than a thinking machine.

ZMan takes a gander.

For a while, it seemed like the human sciences might finally close the gap between metaphysics and morality that has plagued us for so long. The age of ideology has relied upon the blurry, unclear understanding of human nature to get away with moral systems that are objectively inhuman. If the sciences could clear up certain things about the human condition, then it would force the ideologues to rethink their claims about how humans ought to act and organize.

The ideologues had an answer to this and that was to declare much of the human sciences haram. The crazies were sent out to proliferate the term “race science” which simply means any science that contradicts the one true faith. The human biodiversity guys never got their head around it and as a result that scene has receded into the shadows of the internet. The people in the professional sciences took the path blazed by conservatives and bent the knee to the crazies.

Team science, in their shadowy warrens on the internet and secret gatherings within the institutions, takes solace in the belief that reality is that thing which does not go away when you stop believing in it. Eventually, the reality of the human condition, as understood by science, will prevail over the increasingly bizarre claims that we see from the ideologues. After all, math must eventually prevail over the people who think you are assigned a sex at birth.

That is most certainly true to a degree. The great snapback we are seeing in public attitudes on a range of issues is due to the excesses of the crazies. It is one thing for a man to put on a dress and parade around town in it. It is another for that man to insist everyone play make-believe with him. One of the truths about progressive values is they prevail only where they comport with general Christian values. When they collide with those values or physical reality, they crumble.

 

Alma T.C. Boykin.  (Whose books I highly recommend.)

So, does a person have to have a word before he can imagine a concept? Or can you understand a concept if your language doesn’t have that word or idea yet? Linguists and historians of language have been arguing over this, and over other questions about how language shapes perception, ever since future Prime Minister William Gladstone write a three-volume analysis about Homer. In a short chapter at the back of the last volume, Gladstone observed that Homer’s descriptions were either about light things, dark things, or red things. Everything else was texture or related it to something (“rosy-fingered dawn”) and so on. Gladstone had some theories about this. He was … ignored, in part because he actually believed that Homer was telling a true story, which everyone knew was silly. Gladstone was right about both things, although not exactly.

It turns out that only comparatively late in the development of languages and vocabulary to people start splitting colors up past dark, light, and blood-colored (red). Next comes yellowy-green, then yellow and green, then blue, and then it gets sort of jumbled. So, does this mean that the human eye develops color vision at different rates in “complex” versus “primitive” societies? Um, well, to make a lot of arguing and anatomy short, no. Colors are need based, to an extent, and only when artificial tints (as in, made by people and put on things like walls, rather than staying on plants and rocks) come into use do larger numbers of color words appear. How the language people finally reached this conclusion is a long and interesting story.

The American Mind.

Attending oral argument last week in the case touching on birthright citizenship pending before the Supreme Court, I observed a combination of confusion, omissions, and outright lies from some of the justices. As the lawyer for one of the amici, I witnessed the Court address the propriety of the nationwide, universal injunctions that have been issued by several district court judges blocking the execution of President Trump’s day-one executive order on birthright citizenship.

Let’s begin with the lies.

ZMan looks at time.

Generational politics is one of the cruder forms of politics as it generally reduces to members of one age cohort hurling slurs at other cohorts. Ironically, the origin of this form of politics is the baby boomer generation, who were the first group of Americans to form an identity around their birth cohort. Baby boomers have since been synonymous with the post-war cultural trends and the radical politics that came to dominate the second half of the twentieth century.

These days, of course, “boomer” has become an epithet due to their children using it to describe degenerate or materialistic culture. Boomers are selfish old people who only care about their stock portfolios and their lawns. They are the “greedy geezers” of this age, which is ironic in that the term first gained traction decades ago as the baby boomers started to take over politics. This is another example of how the universe has a sense of a humor and cruel streak.

Of course, thirty years ago when terms like “greedy geezer” were getting tossed around, the culture was undergoing a generational shift. The WW2 Generation was giving way to the baby boomers. Bill Clinton came to be seen as the typical boomer, ushering in a new set of morals and sensibilities to politics. For the last thirty years, baby boomer politics have been American politics. Now they are seen the out of date politics of a quickly fading era.

Read it.

Only if another country (like, oh, say, China; or its lapdog, North Korea) attacks us with ICBMS.

If nobody attacks us, then it won’t be a ‘battlefield’. Problem solved.

Read it.

Dogs don’t like it when you rub their noses in the poop the put on the carpet.

Scientific American, unfortunatley these days a Voice of the Crust.

In 1884 the anthropologist Franz Boas returned from Baffin Island with a discovery that would kick off decades of linguistic wrangling: by his count, the local Inuit language had four words for snow, suggesting a link between language and physical environment. A great game of telephone inflated the number until, in 1984, the New York Times published an editorial claiming the Inuit have “100 synonyms” for the frozen white stuff we lump under a single term.

Boas’s observation had swelled to mythic proportions. In a 1991 essay, British linguist Geoff Pullum called these claims a “hoax,” citing the work of linguist Laura Martin, who tracked the misinformation’s evolution. He likened it to the xenomorph from Alien, a creature that “seemed to spring up everywhere once it got loose on the spaceship, and was very difficult to kill.” His acerbic critique rendered the subject taboo for a generation, says Victor Mair, an expert on Chinese language at the University of Pennsylvania. But now, he says, “it’s coming back in a legitimate way.”

In a sweeping new computational analysis of world languages, researchers not only confirmed the emphasis on snow in the Inuit language Inuktitut but also uncovered many similar patterns: what snow is to the Inuit, lava is to Samoans and oatmeal to Scots. The results were published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA in April. Charles Kemp, a computational psychologist at the University of Melbourne in Australia and senior author of the study, says the results offer a window onto language speakers’ culture. “It’s a way to get a sense of the ‘chief interests of a people’—what’s important to a society, what they prioritize and value,” he says, quoting Boas.

Read it.

From atop the flawed foudndation of the Labor Theory of Value, Karl Marx made a series of predictions about capitalism that time has proven incorrect. Among these are the immiseration of the masses due to capital accumulation, chronic overproduction, capitalist-driven imperialism, and the inevitable rise of monopolies.

Read it.

The Tariff Tantrum has proven that consensus was wrong about soaring inflation and an economic slump. Why? The exaggerated perception of tariffs’ economic impact stemmed from the belief that American consumers would bear the full burden of tariffs. Why were they wrong?

The first reason was that most analyses relied on a simplistic calculation of tariffs, treating supply chains as if they only involved buyers and sellers. Supply chains are very complex, and most exporters must deal with overcapacity challenges and working capital problems. Thus, the impact of tariffs is likely to be absorbed by numerous links in the supply chain, including transport, storage, distribution, manufacturing, retailers and purchasing chains.

Furthermore, most exporting companies face a significant problem of overcapacity and working capital; if they don’t sell their products fast and effectively, their debt soars, and the losses at warehouses can lead to a chain of bankruptcies.

Washington Free Beacon.

Three House committee chairs threatened Harvard University’s nonprofit status following a Washington Free Beacon report revealing that the Ivy League school repeatedly trained members of a Chinese “paramilitary organization” after the U.S. government sanctioned the group for its role in the Uyghur genocide.

Republican representatives Elise Stefanik (N.Y.), Tim Walberg (Mich.), and John Moolenaar (Mich.)—who chair House Republican Leadership, the Committee on Education and Workforce, and the Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, respectively—sent a letter to Harvard president Alan Garber on Monday demanding comprehensive details about the university’s activities with the Chinese Communist Party.

Those activities include hosting and training members of the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps (XPCC), which the U.S. Department of the Treasury described as a “paramilitary organization … that is subordinate to the Chinese Communist Party” while announcing sanctions on the group in 2020. China-focused research group Strategy Risks first uncovered a 2023 training, while the Free Beacon uncovered a second that took place in 2024.

T. E. Fehranbach:

Generations that have been shielded from the brutalities of the past are poorly equipped to cope with those of their own times.

ZMan runs the numbers.

One of the realities of the late managerial age is that the sorts of numbers managers love and therefore produce in volume, are increasingly unreliable and often manufactured to fit an agenda. Good data is usually too late to be actionable or is simply the accurate version of the previously reported fake data. Economic data is the most obvious example of this trend. It used to be central to the news cycle but has now become so corrupt the media will ignore it.

In the Biden years, much like the Obama years, it became popular with the reporting agencies to produce fake economic numbers and then come back at a later date to “revise” the previous data so they could pretend they were being accurate. It was always a cycle where new data contained information about how the previous data was revised in a way negative to the administration, but often made the new data look like the administration was doing a great job.

Peak managerial mendacity was Covid. The CDC stopped reporting deaths as a real-time number so they could report fictionalized accounts of bodies in the streets, always somewhere not where you live, which explained why you did not see the bodies in the streets, but they were somewhere! Old metrics that relied on hard data, like dead people showing up in morgues, were massaged to the point where you could no longer get the number of actual dead people.

Read it.

Hundreds of World Health Organization officials will join donors and diplomats in Geneva from Monday with one question dominating their thoughts: How to tackle crises from mpox to cholera without their main funder, the United States.

Guess they’ll just have to pay for their own shit. Quel dommage.

Read it.

For those of us who have often wondered about the “A Note on the Type” notices in the backs of books, this is a good read.

Read it.

Ocasio-Cortez hasn’t been pictured wearing her engagement ring since November 2023, according to an extensive Washington Free Beacon review of Getty and Associated Press images, as well as the lawmaker’s social media posts and public appearances. The ring’s 17-month absence, which has gone unnoticed in the press until now, raises questions about the status of her betrothal to her low-profile fiancé, web developer Riley Roberts, who proposed to Ocasio-Cortez during a vacation to Puerto Rico in April 2022. No news of their nuptials has emerged in the three years since.

Ocasio-Cortez confirmed in May 2022 that Roberts proposed to her with a “zero emission” ring made from “recycled gold.” The ring, which she later reported as a gift from Roberts worth $3,057.04, was a constant presence on the ring finger of her left hand during the first year and several months of her engagement. She flaunted it to her followers on Instagram Live, sported it on her overseas junket to Latin America, and wore it to televised committee hearings. The ring can be seen in almost every photo taken of the lawmaker in public with a clear shot of her left hand from May 2022 through November 2023.

And then it seemingly disappeared. Since the start of December 2023, Ocasio-Cortez has given a primetime speech at the DNC, attended several televised committee hearings, appeared on the Late Show, and toured the nation on a private jet with Sen. Bernie Sanders (I., Vt.), among countless other public appearances. Ocasio-Cortez didn’t wear her engagement ring to any of those events, though she frequently sported several other bands on the fingers of both her hands.

Read it.

President Trump’s second term will likely be regarded as a major public health inflection point, driven by the “Make America Healthy Again” (MAHA) movement. The initiative aims to revolutionize a broken system rigged against patients—creating disease and then profiting from it—while also targeting reform of the nation’s food supply chain, which is dominated by the processed food industrial complex.

Goldman analysts Leah Jordan and Eli Thompson provided clients with early indications that consumers are shifting and seeking “better-for-you options” at the supermarket.

“Softer snacking demand with outperformance in better-for-you options,” Jordan wrote in a note to clients earlier this month.

Read it.

On Friday, the U.S. lost its last perfect credit rating as Moody’s downgraded it from ‘AAA’ to ‘Aa1,’ citing decades of rising deficits and interest costs. This ends a perfect rating streak held since 1917. Moody’s had warned in 2023 that a downgrade was possible, following similar moves by Fitch in 2023 and S&P in 2011.

The layers of irony behind this downgrade—and its timing—aren’t lost on me.

It’s a farce, really. By the logic Moody’s is now applying, the downgrade should have happened a decade ago, when it became painfully clear that the U.S. had a crippling spending addiction, compounded by a monetary ideology that essentially tried to reverse the fundamental laws of debits and credits.

Yes, it’s bad enough that the U.S. now carries $37 trillion in debt. But what’s worse is that, despite this massive burden, deficits have continued to grow—clear proof that we’ve learned nothing about fiscal restraint. Our refusal to stop putting everything on the national credit card, and our complete disregard for basic math and economic reality, should have triggered multiple downgrades over the past decade.

But the real kicker isn’t just the reckless spending—it’s our full embrace of Modern Monetary Theory, which doesn’t just ignore this irresponsibility but actively encourages it. Yet, somehow, Moody’s didn’t see a problem with monetary policy anytime before Friday.

…

Every time Paul Krugman wrote another column or Stephanie Kelton published a new book—and then got a national media platform to promote it—the U.S. deserved a downgrade.

Watch it.

Even more interesting is that one can tell from election maps of Poland the dividing lines between pre-1945 Poland and pre-1945 Germany (which territories are now Polish). I had thought that most of the Germans were expelled and replaced by Poles in those terrirories, but apparently some attitudes still persist.

Tools of Renewal.

One benefit, if you can call it that, of the apocalypse is that the news is very interesting these days. Today, I read that certain types of machine guns are now legal throughout the US under federal, but not necessarily state, law. No approval process or federal tax stamp required. There’s an entertaining morning read.

The general rule is that the feds will not let you have a gun that left the factory capable of shooting full auto unless you pay for an enhanced background check, hand over $200 as an infringing discouragement tax, and agree to have your name on a federal list forever. This also applies to certain gun parts. In addition, your gun or part has to have been made before a certain date in 1986. This is more or less how it works, but it’s not a rigorous explanation.

There has been a lot of squabbling over certain gun parts made after the 1986 cutoff. One example is the bump stock. Another is the lightning link, which is a little piece of steel you put in an AR-platform gun to turn it into a machine gun. A guy is currently rotting in prison for selling a steel card featuring a picture of a lightning link that requires the user to cut it out and install it.

Another example: the forced-reset trigger or “FRT.” I don’t know exactly how these work because I DO NOT HAVE ONE, MR. ATF BLOG READER. I have seen people shooting them on Youtube, however, and it seems fair to me to say they turn AR’s into machine guns. They work very well, unlike bump stocks, which wobble around.

While they turn guns into machine guns for practical purposes, guns with FRT’s aren’t “machine guns” according to federal law’s definition. That’s what Pam Bondi now says, according to a federal lawsuit that was resolved yesterday.

The New Yorker, a Voice of the Crust.

In 2000, Dickson D. Despommier, then a professor of public health and microbiology at Columbia University, was teaching a class on medical ecology in which he asked his students, “What will the world be like in 2050?,” and a follow-up, “What would you like the world to be like in 2050?” As Despommier told The New Yorker’s Ian Frazier in 2017, his students “decided that by 2050 the planet will be really crowded, with eight or nine billion people, and they wanted New York City to be able to feed its population entirely on crops grown within its own geographic limit.” The class had calculated that by farming every square foot of rooftop space in the city, you could provide enough calories to feed only about two per cent of the 2050 population of New York.

Urban farming was a good idea, Despommier thought, but his students hadn’t taken it far enough. “What’s wrong with putting the farmer inside the building?” he asked them, remembering that at the time there were “hundreds to perhaps thousands” of empty buildings in New York City. Throughout the next decade, as he continued to teach the class, Despommier and his students developed this idea—including the use of cultivation techniques that required little or no soil—culminating in the 2010 book, “The Vertical Farm: Feeding the World in the 21st Century.” The concept proved popular and has been widely implemented. There are now more than two thousand vertical farms in the U.S. alone, with a market value estimated at $5.6 billion in 2022.

ZMan’s weekly podcast. Highly recommended.

The thing I wanted to get to last week, but spent too much time bashing the Protestants, is that we are in an age in which we not only have a fractured morality, but we also have a fractured metaphysics. The extreme example is we have some people who think their sex is assigned to them at birth. If they wish hard enough, they can change their sex and transcend the two-sex paradigm.

Crazy people are a part of every society, so while these people are fringe weirdos, they get support from a large and powerful segment of society. Many of our ruling class question the basics of reality. They are open to sex being imaginary because they are open to reality being a shared delusion created by the pale penis people to dominate the nonwhite population.

It is exceedingly difficult to have a society composed of people with differing opinions about how society ought to be organized and how we ought to live in it. If the differences are not too wide, then some compromise can be made. It is not possible to have a stable society when large parts of it have a different conception of reality from other parts of society, which is the present situation.

The Register.

Science fiction author Neal Stephenson has suggested AIs should be allowed to fight other AIs, because evolution brings balance to ecosystems, but also thinks humans should stop using AI before it dumbs down our species.

Stephenson coined the term “metaverse” in his 1992 classic “Snow Crash”, and his 1999 epic “Cryptonomicon” envisioned digital currencies and the encryption needed to make them possible. The prescience of those works, and the cracking yarns he spins, mean he is in demand as both a novelist and thinker.

Yeah, gotta love those ‘cracking yarns’. I suspect that no one has ever characterized  Margaret Atwood’s proglodyte sexist propaganda as ‘cracking yarns’.

Nor is there any reason to.

The American Mind.

In 2006, James C. Ho wrote an article titled “Defining ‘American’: Birthright Citizenship and the Original Understanding of the Fourteenth Amendment.” Since his appointment to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in 2018, his article has gained greater attention and authority than it otherwise might have done. Judge Ho was nominated by President Trump as an adherent of original intent jurisprudence, and the president’s confidence in Judge Ho’s fidelity to the Constitution seems to have been amply borne out by some of his early opinions. In one concurring opinion, he wrote that “it is hard to imagine a better example of how far we have strayed from the text and original understanding of the Constitution than this case.”

“Text and original understanding” are, indeed, the reliable touchstones of constitutional jurisprudence. But Judge Ho did not live up to those standards in his attempt to uncover the meaning of the Citizenship Clause of the 14th Amendment, even as he has recently indicated he understands the high stakes involved. He did write that “under our Constitution, the people are not subjects, but citizens.” While Judge Ho provides no acknowledgment, this is a close paraphrase of a statement made by signer of the Declaration and the Constitution and Supreme Court Justice James Wilson quoted in chapter two. “Under the Constitution of the United States,” Wilson wrote in 1793, in the case of Chisolm v. Georgia, “there are citizens, but no subjects.”

There are crucial differences. Justice Wilson was criticizing Blackstone and the common law as providing no legitimate ground for republican government. Judge Ho, however, argues that the holding in Wong Kim Ark is correct—that the Citizenship Clause of the 14th Amendment rests on the English common law, despite the fact that the principal architects of the Citizenship Clause clearly argued that it did not. It would be difficult, then, to argue that Judge Ho was an original intent jurisprude on the issue of citizenship.

ZMan says the quiet part out loud.

The professional commentators and amateur experts have been highly critical of the Trump foreign policy, but despite his unorthodox approach, Trump seems to be making progress that those experts claimed was impossible. The recent trip to the GCC countries is the most recent example. Lost in the shuffle is Iran stating they are ready to do a deal with Trump on their nuclear program. Today, the Russians and Ukrainian will meet in Istanbul to talk peace.

This meeting is remarkable mostly because a key element to Project Ukraine from the start was that there could be no negotiations with Russia. Without saying it, the Biden admin and the Europeans would only accept the unconditional surrender of Russia and even then, the terms would be harsh. The Ukrainians were happy to say the quiet part out loud, going so far as to declare it unlawful to deal with the Russians. In a few months Trump has them talking in Turkey.

It may be dumb luck that has got Trump to this point. A week ago, the Europeans were scheming with Zelensky on a set of ultimatums. The Russians either surrender and withdraw from Ukraine or else. On top of that, Keith Kellogg was peddling his scheme to insert Western troops into Ukraine as part of a peace keeping force. The Russians offered to meet with the Ukrainians in Istanbul and Trump seized on this to pressure Zelensky to agree to talks with the Russians.

Daily Record (UK).

A man met a gruesome end in Yellowstone Park when he decided to take a dip in one of its renowned hot springs.

Tragically, Colin Scott’s death was inadvertently filmed by his sister on her smartphone, unknowingly capturing her brother’s last moments.

Think of it as evolution in action. Natural Selection works every time. A Darwin Award candidate for sure.