The New York Times, a Voice of the Crust.

Japanese researchers turned to “experimental archaeology” to study how ancient humans navigated powerful ocean currents and migrated offshore.

Hey, tenure doesn’t grow on trees, you know.

Read it.

This is a post just to share a thought and guard against wishful thinking. The recent NYC primary election of privileged radical Zohran Mamdani has reminded me again of evidence of an often repeated folly of libertarians: the delusion that when once the public has experienced failed Leftist policies, they will all of a sudden be struck with self reflective insight, soon recanting past support of the failed policies, and then, finally, the newly enlightened public will support libertarian principles. An odd result of this line of thinking frequently suggests that it’s good if the others win because their failure will become a future victory. This thinking rests on the big assumption of effective and accurate feedback within a well-functioning process.

Now I’d like to state for full disclosure that I have sympathy with libertarian ideas and principles, and have been influenced by them throughout my life. However, the older I get, the more conservative I have become, and the less tolerance I find myself having with overly idealistic libertarians who are not fully plugged into reality and the way the world actually works. I think to be conservative, you must base your views, as best you can, on concrete truths and observed history and lessons learned from tradition. In this regard, libertarians fail. Soft Republicans also keep the libertarians company on this point more often than I’d like.

Case in point, the election of Zohran Mamdani. The WSJ has a new opinion article that describes the failures of the Democrat Party in NY, leading to the rise of Zohran Mamdani. So an even bigger progressive radical is required to fix the problems that the more mild progressive policies created. Yeah, right. Now, a conservative will look at the situation in NY, especially NYC, and think that it is becoming lost. To mitigate the downward spiral of NYC, a practical conservative would throw weight behind the besieged Mayor Adams (running as an independent) to fend off the truly fanatical Zohran Mamdani. From there, efforts could be made to help recover some conservative influence in governance. Or at least mitigate the awful. On the other hand, you get the libertarian types who want to see Zohran Mamdani because it will be so, so awful that it will inevitably lead to a libertarian utopia. The odds are slim to none, I say.

The essential libertarian mistake is in presuming that all adults are rational and both know and pursue their own interests.

Read it.

A new study from JAMA Pediatrics should stop us in our tracks: early adolescents who report addictive use of screens—not just frequent use—are more than twice as likely to consider suicide within two years.

And I would encourage them to do so. Think of it as evolution in action.

One of the most defective aspects of modern society, especially modern technological society, is its commitment to promoting the continued existence of people whom Natural Selection would otherwise be attempting to subtract from the gene pool.

The whole Cult of Self-Worth toward which everything in modern life seems to be pointed is just making the world worse for all of us.

s

New York Post.

Friday with a blunt takedown of liberal Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s “extreme” dissent in the landmark birthright citizenship case in which the Supreme Court curtailed lower court use of universal injunctions.

“We will not dwell on Justice Jackson’s argument, which is at odds with more than two centuries’ worth of precedent, not to mention the Constitution itself,” wrote Barrett, the court’s second-newest justice, in a jaw-dropping rebuke of her colleague, the newest justice.

“We observe only this: Justice Jackson decries an imperial Executive while embracing an imperial Judiciary.”

Ron White: “You cain’t fix stupid.”

Power Line.

A question for discussion: why are so many rich people socialists and communists? Maybe it has long been true; one could cite the example of Friedrich Engels. But I think there are more rich socialists now than ever. It is almost touching to see Bernie Sanders and friends on their “Fighting Oligarchy Tour.” Someone needs to tell poor Bernie that these days, the oligarchs are mostly on his side.

 

Read it.

The fact that many children are ditching America’s public schools is undeniable. Most recently, Nat Malkus, Deputy Director of Education Policy at the American Enterprise Institute, reported that while chronic absenteeism spiked during the COVID pandemic, it remains a serious problem.

In 2024, rates were 57% higher than they were before the pandemic. (Students who miss at least 10% of the school year, or roughly 18 days, are considered chronically absent.)

Malkus goes on to explain that in 2018 and 2019, about 15% of K–12 public school students in the U.S. were chronically absent—a number so high that numerous observers and the U.S. Department of Education are labeling it a “crisis.”

A ‘crisis’ is whenever anything goes against the Narrative and appears to be winning.

In total, nearly one in twelve public schools in the United States has experienced a “substantial” enrollment decline over the last five years.

The problem is especially egregious in our big cities. In Los Angeles, more than 32% of students were chronically absent in the 2023-2024 school year.

In Chicago, dwindling enrollment has left about 150 schools half-empty, while 47 operate at less than one-third capacity.

People are waking up to the fact that they are paying for steak and receiving shit sandwiches.

Read it.

Massie, who has served as the 4th Congressional District of Kentucky’s representative since 2012, is known to occasionally buck the GOP party line with his fiscal conservatism and foreign intervention skepticism. That has served him well representing his district, where he won 75% of the vote in the 2024 Republican primary. But Massie may have finally worn out Trump’s patience by declaring on X that his weekend bombing of Iran was not constitutional.

One often hears the phrase “He’s a man of his word” but one never hears the phrase “She’s a woman of her word”.

Ponder why that is.

Read it.

The shift from “search engine” to “answer engine” has been discussed for years. But we’re now watching it happen in real time — and professional services aren’t ready.

Legal services in particular have long been immune to disruption because they’ve hidden behind regulatory insulation, geographic moats and old-school word-of-mouth. But the AI layer doesn’t care about any of that. A good LLM doesn’t need to know your bar number — it just needs to know how people ask legal questions and what a competent, jurisdiction-specific answer should sound like.

That’s why some law firms are already building their own GPTs — custom-trained legal assistants that sit natively on their websites and handle intake. Others are feeding vector databases with cleaned verdicts, client FAQs and state-specific procedures to make their firms “AI-readable” in the next wave of query-routing tools.

The ones thinking a step further are trying to get inside the models — via licensing deals, training partnerships or API-driven apps that plug directly into platforms such as ChatGPT’s GPT Store.

Because let’s be honest: If your law firm doesn’t show up in the AI’s output, you’re invisible to the next generation of clients.

Read it.

As President Donald Trump and his administration work on expanding deportation operations, the White House is reporting that blue-collar workers have seen the most significant growth in wages in over half a century.

“In President Donald Trump’s first five months in office, real wages for hourly workers have seen their largest increase under any administration in nearly 60 years—and we’re just getting started with pro-growth, pro-prosperity policies that finally put America First,” the White House reported this week. Blue-collar American workers have seen an increase of 1.7% in real wages over the past five months.

The only other times blue-collar workers have seen any rise in wages during the first five months of a presidency in the last 56 years was under the first Trump administration (1.3%) and Richard Nixon’s administration in 1969 (0.8%).

Read it.

Everyone seems to want to break down silos. They are monsters to be destroyed. In consultant-speak, silos stand for isolation, inefficiency, and a myopic refusal to collaborate. The “silo mentality” is a dysfunctional reluctance to share information. In universities, silos are the cause of duplicated efforts, internal competition, and the failure to innovate to serve the customer-student.

Everything about this view is wrong. In the AI era, the responsibility of researchers and specialists to preserve domain-specific knowledge with integrity, to keep going deep while others go broad, will be more important than ever. The universities that protect disciplinary silos are the ones who will thrive.

In fact, the metaphor makes my case. A real, physical silo is a marvel of functional design. Silos store and protect grain. Silos preserve quality and integrity. Without silos, grain rots. A silo is a sanctuary. Its purpose is preservation, not isolation.

Much like the canard Diversity Is Our Strength. Diversity is actually a weakness, promoting division, suspicion, and cliquishness.

Power Line.

In her New York Post Devine Online newsletter, Miranda Devine draws attention to a statement from President Trump that seems worthy of more attention than it has received. Devine quoted Trump speaking at a ceremony at the White House Wednesday where he had a near 100-foot flagpole installed, Asked by a reporter what gave him the idea for the giant flag, he replied: “I’ve had it for a long time. The first time I had it, you guys [the media] were after me and I said, ‘I had to focus.’”

“I was the hunted,” Trump said of his first term, “and now I’m the hunter. It’s a big difference.”

Think of it as evolution in action.

Watch it.

Nick Norwitz was valedictorian at Dartmouth, got a PhD from Oxford and an MD from Harvard.

I think it’s safe to say that he knows more about nutrition than anybody you’ve ever heard of.

Read it.

“Imagine if your job is to write jokes that are funnier than what Democrats are already doing in real life,” Dillon said with a smile.

Truest thing you know.

Read it.

Try searching your full name online right now and see what surfaces. Within a few clicks, you’re likely seeing your home address, phone number, age, and even details about family members.

If that’s what a simple search turns up, just imagine what malicious actors can find when their business relies on exploiting your personal data. If there was a big red delete button, you’d set a new record for how fast you could smash it!

The problem is there isn’t one, unless you know where to look…

My favorite method is to track down people publishing my information online and kill them in horrible ways as an example and warning to others. But, then, I’m retired and have a lot of time on my hands. KEYWORDS: #ganching #somethinglingeringwithboilingoilinit

Watch it.

Inquiring minds want to know.

The New Neo.

She says it better than I could. He will be missed.

Read it.

President Trump gave a speech at Fort Bragg today to a record crowd of U.S. soldiers. As part of his remarks, the president announced that the forts that used to be named for Confederate generals will have those names restored, including Fort Hood, Fort A.P. Hill, and Fort Robert E. Lee.

Read it.

The Posse Comitatus Act bars federal troops from participating in civilian law enforcement except when expressly authorized by law. This 143-year-old law embodies an American tradition that sees military interference in civilian affairs as a threat to both democracy and personal liberty. However, recent events have revealed dangerous gaps in the law’s coverage that Congress must address.

I suspect the author to be of the progressive persuasion, if not an actual Trump-hater. But this is the only useful discussion of the Act that I could find, and people need to know about it.

Babylon Bee.

Me, too.

As soon as A observes something which seems to him to be wrong, from which X is suffering, A talks it over with B, and A and B then propose to get a law passed to remedy the evil and help X. Their law always proposes to determine what C shall do for X, or in the better case, what A, B, and C shall do for X….. What I want to do is to look up C. I want to show you what manner of man he is. I call him the Forgotten Man. Perhaps the appellation is not strictly correct. He is the man who never is thought of….

He works, he votes, generally he prays-but he always pays….

—WILLIAM GRAHAM SUMNER, YALE UNIVERSITY, 1883

ZMan:

Something I did not cover in the show, but will probably be an issue this week, is the role of the usual suspects in the Los Angeles riots. Mike Benz has been posting about the fact that the National Endowment for Democracy has tentacles in these riots. Karen Bass, the Los Angeles mayor, was a long-serving member of the board of directors at NED. When she was in Congress, she was on a committee that oversaw the organization.

This is how the regime operates. It has access to hundreds of billions of dollars it uses to place its people in key posts inside the administrative state and get its friends elected. This is why it is impossible to cut a cent of spending from the budget. Instead of starting a race war, this time they are hoping to create a legume rebellion. This time, it seems that the Trump admin is prepared and maybe even let the Los Angeles thing play-out so they had a reason to go hard on it.

Watch it.

Some excellent thoughts on what is going on in the world today.

Epoch Times.

Do we really need fewer routines and more excuses to sit and stare at our computers while machines do even more work for us?

Count me among the skeptics. We have been replacing household routines with machines for a century. Some have merit because the manual way is too arduous. I would rather have a vacuum cleaner than beat out rugs, even if the latter method is better in the long run. Same with dishwashers and washing machines. I get that they save time.

But there comes a point when it is all too much. The trigger for me was the “smart” lightbulb. That’s where I drew the line. I would rather stand up and turn it off and on than become nothing but a couch potato with a smartphone. There are reasons perhaps for the ability to remotely manage household temperature, but if I were building today, I would look long and hard for analog over digital thermostats.

Need? No. Want? Almost certainly yes. The point this author ignores is that you can do things the Old Fashioned Way if you want to (sometimes the old ways are best) but you won’t need to. No one is forcing you to sit on the couch rather than getting up to turn off the light You’ll have the power to choose.

Yes, a portion of the population will choose to be ‘couch potatoes’ rather than Amish. That’s their choice. And that’s a choice that they ought to have.

But natural selection works. In a hundred years, we will know which method is ‘better’ – assuming that both don’t survive as being most appropriate for different types of people.

Read it.

Examples of decentralized society in history are often hidden. They are hidden because those in decentralized societies never bothered to keep records. They are also hidden for the purposes of the current state. I have previously written about anarchy in the Southeast Asian Highlands as one example. Here, I will present the time of the Middle Ages as another.

Read it.

All this while, we have been fixated on different manifestations of life as we find it on Earth. We see bacteria, zebra fish, or fruit fly and start wondering whether we got lucky here on Earth, or whether our universe contains many more similar instances of life.

But, is this even the right question to ask? If we’re identifying life as we know it on Earth, we’re blinding ourselves to the only instance of life as we know it (with self-replication, cells, DNA, etc.). But, why should we expect life to be the same way in the rest of the universe?

Are cells fundamental? Does life have to be necessarily carbon-based? Sure, we can define life as anything. It’s an overloaded term. But if we keep defining it with traits we observe on Earth, we will be like that guy who only searches for his keys under the street light because that’s the only thing he can see.

Of course, to discover alien life, we need to first know what we’re looking for. But defining all life as being Earth-like is too myopic. What should we do?

Paul Graham.

An essay has to tell people something they don’t already know. But there are three different reasons people might not know something, and they yield three very different kinds of essays.

…

The impact of an essay is how much it changes readers’ thinking multiplied by the importance of the topic. But it’s hard to do well at both. It’s hard to have big new ideas about important topics. So in practice there’s a tradeoff: you can change readers’ thinking a lot about moderately important things, or change it a little about very important ones. But with younger readers the tradeoff shifts. There’s more room to change their thinking, so there’s a bigger payoff for writing about important things.

The Atlantic, a Voice of the Crust.

He was gathering data at another slaughterhouse in 2010 when, late one evening, he spotted two carcasses resembling the outlier he’d seen years before. Lawrence—by then an animal-science professor at West Texas A&M University—immediately called the head of his department. It was nearly 11 p.m. and his boss was already in bed, but Lawrence made his pitch anyway: He wanted to reverse engineer an outstanding steak by bringing superior cuts of meat back to life. He would clone the dead animals, and then mate the clones. “Think of our project as one in which you’re crossbreeding carcasses,” he told me.
A few years later, Lawrence and his team turned two tiny cubes of meat, sliced off exceptional beef carcasses at a packing plant, into one cloned bull and three cloned heifers. After breeding the bull with the heifers, Lawrence slaughtered the offspring to assess the quality of the meat, and found it to be just as terrific as the originals’. The next generation’s meat was even better than that—superior, even, to that of animals bred from the cattle industry’s top bulls.

Read it.

The Autopen machine is a mechanical device used to automatically recreate genuine-looking signatures of a given person. These machines were first developed around the beginning of the 20th century but only became widely used in the last 60 years or so.

Although most people are unaware of their existence, Autopen machines are widely used by government institutions, businesses and celebrities. Certainly all U.S. presidents since Eisenhower have used them at one time or another (JFK was one of the first big users). In the context of this site obviously the most important users are the NASA astronauts, all of whom were (and still are) given access to these machines and encouraged to use them.

The use of Autopens machines is generally justified by the fact that they allow the signee to spend their time on their job rather than signing autographs or routine documents. In the case of NASA there was no way that the Apollo astronauts could have routinely signed all autograph requests and still done their jobs so NASA had to choose between refusing all requests or sending out Autopenned signatures.

Choosing the latter option probably made a lot of people happy at the time as the vast majority of recipients would have been unaware that the signatures were not genuine. Even some astronauts unknowingly ended up with Autopen signatures of their fellow astronauts in their own personal collections.

Fake it ’til you make it.

NavyMatters.

The Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) is a reserve inventory of crude oil intended for use in the event of war or extreme emergencies. Oil is stored in 62 salt caverns at four sites along the Gulf of Mexico and holds a total of 714 million barrels of crude oil. In the event of war, the reserve could be used not only for direct military oil needs but also to supply defense industries. To give an idea of the practical impact of the SPR, as of Jan 2022, the SPR represented around 1450 days of total U.S. petroleum net imports at the usage rates at that time.

As an emergency supply, the importance of maintaining the supply at full capacity is self-evident. Unfortunately, President Biden drew down the storage levels for political gain in violation of the intent of the reserve.

As they do.

Babylon Bee.

Sounds about right to me.