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.

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.

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.

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.

Read it.

A student arrested last week for storming a Columbia University library—during which radicals distributed pro-Hamas propaganda and injured two security officials—was once hosted by New York City mayor Eric Adams, who lauded her commitment to peace and dialogue.

You can’t make this stuff up.

Associated Press, a Voice of the Crust.

A former FBI agent and Pentagon contractor has sued the founder of a conservative nonprofit known for its hidden camera stings over secretly recorded videos showing the contractor criticizing President Donald Trump to a woman he thought he had taken on a date.

Jamie Mannina says in his lawsuit that he was misled by a woman he met on a dating website who held herself out as a politically liberal nurse but who was actually working with the conservative activist James O’Keefe in a sting operation designed to induce Mannina into making “inflammatory and damaging” remarks that could be recorded, “manipulated” and posted online.

Clips from their January conversations were spliced together to make it appear that Mannina was “essentially attempting to launch an unlawful coup against President Trump,” and articles released online with the videos defamed Mannina by painting him as part of a “deep state” effort with senior military officials to undermine Trump’s presidency, according to the lawsuit filed Wednesday in federal court in Washington.

Mannina does not deny in the lawsuit making the comments but says his words were taken out of context, edited and pieced together in a manner designed to paint him in a false light, including in a written description on YouTube that accompanied the publication of one of the recordings.

Be careful out there.

Babylon Bee.

You think it’s a joke but it’s not.

Zman peers behind the curtain.

President Trump has wrapped up his trip to Saudi Arabia and the Western media is trying hard to ignore it. The main reason is they hate Trump, of course, but a secondary reason is they do not understand the importance of the trip. To them, it just looks like another foreign trip by a president. In reality it is a glimpse of how the large share owners of America Inc. are restructuring the company. The deals signed in Saudi Arabia are the first step in that restructuring.

For fifty years, the United States and Saudi Arabia had an agreement primarily centered around oil trade and the use of the U.S. dollar. The formal part of the agreement committed the Saudis to investing their profits from energy into U.S. Treasuries in exchange for American military commitments. The result was the Saudis priced everything in dollars, which led all other OPEC members to work in dollars, thus establishing the petrodollar concept.

The reason the dollar is the world’s reserve currency is it is backed with energy, the one thing everyone needs. The gold bugs like to say the dollar is “fiat currency” and is just colorful bits of paper, but that was always false. The dollar, like all real money, represents power. From the 1970’s to the present, the dollar represented the power of the United States and the power of hydrocarbons. Instead of money backed by shiny bits of metal, the dollar was backed by energy.

Few are the situations that cannot be improved by going out for burritos.

Read it.

Financial Times journalist Patrick McGee has released a gripping new book that meticulously exposes Apple’s deeply troubling ties with China, revealing how these connections fueled the communist regime’s rise to a global manufacturing powerhouse.

In an interview with The Free Press founder Bari Weiss, McGee revealed key insights from his new book, Apple in China, detailing Apple’s complex relationship with the country.

Presently, approximately 155 million Americans own an iPhone – a remarkable figure that McGee contends would have been unattainable without Apple’s substantial investments in China.

“I think it’s fairly straightforward that China is the only place on the planet that has the tech competence in terms of manufacturing capability, certainly the price, the cost, the quantity, the scale,” McGee told Weiss. My novel argument is that it has those skills because Apple built them there, right? It’s not that China offered something to Apple. Apple didn’t find these skills in China; it shipped people over by the plane load and created them.”

Oh, I don’t think it’s as bad as all that. China has a lot of people, and a lot of those people are very smart and very educated. If you want to put a thousand engineers on a project suddenly, it’s easier to do that in China than almost anywhere else in the world. That’s a tremendous attraction for businesses that need to ramp up production quickly or shift production in a different direction quickly.

Gentrification, Deep State style.

John Hinderaker at Power Line.

Democrats are desperate for a recession, to give them something to run on in 2026. Their hopes for a recession lie in the “trade war” that was declared by American newspapers within weeks of President Trump taking office. But so far, no trade war has materialized. And perhaps it won’t, as American and Chinese negotiators have quickly agreed on a framework for a trade agreement.

Read it.

After days of missile strikes and drone assaults across the India-Pakistan border, India launched a powerful and unprecedented aerial retaliation—one that may have taken the escalating conflict to the doorstep of Pakistan’s nuclear command.

According to top Indian military officials, it was Pakistan’s sustained missile barrage and attempted drone strikes on Indian cities that triggered the Indian response. In a press briefing on 11 May 2025, Air Marshal AK Bharti revealed that India had conducted “precise, measured and calibrated” air strikes targeting key Pakistani military infrastructure, including air bases, command centers, and air defense systems across the western front.

Among the targets reportedly hit were 11 Pakistani military bases—Nur Khan, Rafiqui, Sargodha, Bholari, Murid, Chunian, Pasrur, Sukkur, Sialkot, Skardu, and Jacobabad—within a three-hour window on the night of May 9 and the morning of May 10. Notably, Chaklala Air Base, located within Islamabad and adjacent to the Nur Khan Airbase, was also struck—an operation Indian officials have described as the “turning point.”

Government sources called the strikes “hell fire,” citing significant damage to Pakistan’s air power. According to estimates shared by Air Marshal Bharti, nearly 20% of Pakistan’s Air Force infrastructure was degraded.

Quillette.

Sex differences in many aspects of behavior and cognition are now well-established. These include women’s more communal (formation of intimate relationships) and men’s more agentic (goal achievement) approach to life, as well as men’s advantage in spatial abilities and women’s advantage in memory for personal experiences (episodic memory). Current debates focus on their origin and range from evolved biases to adherence to socially imposed gender roles.

Sex differences in brain organization and functions are the last frontier in this line of research, and their study is shaping up to be a ruckus. The results will eventually resolve the issue of the relative contributions of biological and cultural influences on sex differences. The associated scientific and social policy stakes are high and far-reaching. Minimal sex differences in brain organization and functions would help to affirm the importance of socially imposed gender roles and support the use of policy interventions to reduce sex differences in important social outcomes. Substantive biological contributions, on the other hand, would raise consequential questions about the wisdom of such interventions.

Read it.

Remember just one month ago when the media was acting like tariffs were a guarantee of 100 years of famine, plague and pestilence? Well tomorrow the stock market is going to be well on its way toward all-time highs, again.

Tom Lee will look like a genius and bears will look like morons. You know the drill. Stop me if you’ve heard this one before.

The Foundry.

The Supreme Court will hear oral arguments Thursday in a case that stems from President Donald Trump’s order on birthright citizenship. But the court won’t be ruling on the constitutionality of Trump’s executive order, but rather on the issue of nationwide injunctions.

“This case is not about the underlying merits,” GianCarlo Canaparo, a Heritage Foundation senior legal fellow, said on a call with reporters last week, adding that the acting U.S. solicitor general was very strategic in asking the Supreme Court to look at the nationwide injunctions issue, instead of the merits of the broader case.

On his first day in office, Trump signed an executive order limiting the interpretation of birthright citizenship.

Historically, the 14th Amendment, which reads, “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside,” has been interpreted to mean anyone born within the borders of the U.S. is a citizen. But Trump’s executive order focuses on the phrase “subject to the jurisdiction thereof,” and holds that those born to parents who are not in the U.S. legally are not subject to U.S. jurisdiction and are therefore not legal citizens.

Almost immediately after Trump signed the order, lawsuits were filed to block it. Three courts have now issued nationwide injunctions on the order, meaning the courts ruled that not only can the order not be enforced against the parties who brought the lawsuit, nor against anyone else in the nation.

For years, there has been debate among legal experts as to whether nationwide injunctions are lawful or not, and now the Supreme Court has the opportunity to provide a definitive answer.

I wonder whether this would work in the U.K.? Probably have to wear a heffiyah to make us immune from the police….

Of course, the $300 dollars it cost then is worth the same as $60,000 now, so it balances out.

Read it.

In brief, pithy chapters, Perry outlines persistent fallacies about the sexual revolution, including the idea that the contraceptive pill, access to abortion, and freedom from supposedly restrictive norms about sex out of wedlock would liberate women. The revolution in morals did bring new freedoms, she concedes, but they were not enjoyed equally. “The sexual revolution has not, in fact, freed all of us,” Perry writes. “It has freed some of us, at a price. Which is exactly what we should expect from such a massive change.” She argues that it is past time we set aside the popular narrative about the sexual revolution, which sees it “as a story only of progress.”

Central to Perry’s argument is the quietly radical acknowledgment of differences between the sexes. The longstanding feminist message that, when it comes to sex, girls can do anything boys can do, is dangerously simplistic. “I accept the fact that men and women are different,” Perry writes. “They have different goals and interests. Those differences aren’t going away.”

These differences, moreover, spring from biological realities that feminism has either ignored or attempted to replace with specious claims: “Liberal feminism promises women freedom,” Perry writes. “But female biology imposes, in reality, limits on that freedom. Women get pregnant, and being pregnant and having children is not compatible with complete freedom.”

CBS News, a Voice of the Crust.

The Trump administration has fired the head of the U.S. Copyright Office, two sources familiar with the situation confirmed to CBS News Saturday.

The firing of Register of Copyrights Shira Perlmutter came after Perlmutter and her office earlier this week issued part three of a lengthy report about artificial intelligence and expressed some concerns and questions about the usage of copyrighted materials by AI technology.

“It is an open question, however, how much data an AI developer needs, and the marginal effect of more data on a model’s capabilities,” the report read. “Not everyone agrees that further increases in data and test performance will necessarily lead to continued real world improvements in utility.”

The Foundry.

The State Department had revoked about 1,500 visas throughout the United States as of late April, Inside Higher Ed estimates. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has investigated some of them, and some visa holders will be asked to leave or be deported if they have broken the conditions of their student status per U.S. immigration law. A small number may be deported if the secretary of state, Marco Rubio, deems their presence detrimental to U.S. foreign policy.

Two professors at Cornell and Yale claimed in The Washington Post that “our foreign students are terrified, and they’re right to be.”

Please. No foreign student who is obeying the conditions of his visa and staying focused on his studies has anything to worry about.

Who else should worry? Yale professors such as Erika and Nicholas Christakis, who treat students as adults, only to then deal with tantrums and Ivy League cancel culture. A decade ago, the Christakises were hounded by students for telling them that a Halloween costume probably wasn’t an intentional hate crime. Don’t think Yale has gotten more tolerant since then. Students from Yalies4Palestine recently tried to build an encampment and reportedly blocked Jewish students from going to class.

Read it.

The liberals and the mainstream media are using scare tactics to upend efforts to bring much-needed transparency, accountability, and fairness to the Medicaid program. In reality, it is the blind defense of the status quo that will ultimately undermine the Medicaid program for those who need it.

A key proposal being considered by the House is whether federal funding for Medicaid expansion should remain as is or whether it is time for Congress to bring federal funding for this added category of enrollees in line with other Medicaid populations.

This debate ties back to Obamacare where the authors not only attempted to bribe the states to expand their Medicaid programs with an enormous bump in federal support but also attempted to punish those states that did not expand by threatening to remove all their Medicaid funding. The Supreme Court stepped in and struck the provision that would have states lose all their Medicaid funding but left in place the new federal enhanced funding.

Read it.

Just over 30 years ago, billionaire financier Sir James Goldsmith offered a sobering prediction over the deleterious effects of gobalization – which Goldsmith argued would hollow out the industrial base of Western nations and devastate the middle and working class.

“I don’t know if you ever saw it, but one of the best explanations of globalization; Sir James Goldsmith came to the United States in 1994 and did an interview with Charlie Rose. He described why we should never approve the Uruguay round of GATT [General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade], and institute the WTO,” Catherine Austin Fitts told Tucker Carlson in an interview last week.

“To this day, he nailed it perfectly…He said we are going to hollow-out the middle-class in the West, and we are going to devastate the quality of our food supply,” Fitts said.

Read it.

Uh-huh. Sure, Bernie. John Kerry uses the same excuse.

Politico, a Voice of the Crust.

Congressional Republicans agree that the federal government has a spending problem. Now top GOP leaders want to make it someone else’s problem — by shifting some safety-net programs onto state budgets.

The plans under discussion could generate hundreds of billions of dollars in savings to finance the GOP’s domestic policy megabill. But they’re vexing Republican lawmakers — many of them former governors and state legislators — who are not interested in addressing Washington’s fiscal woes by creating them in state capitals, including those run by their own party.

Read it.

The question comes to me from more and more Europeans these days: “Do you still support Donald Trump after all of this?”

By “all of this,” they usually mean the bizarre and destructive tariffs regime the White House rolled out in April, on what Trump called “Liberation Day.” But there is more, of course: Trump’s harsh deportation regime against illegal migrants, his substantive assault on universities, his wrecking of the NATO alliance, his weird trolling of Canada (“America’s 51st State”) and Denmark, over Greenland, et cetera.

My answer is: Yes, I agree that most of this has been troubling, some more than others. So why do I, as an American conservative, still back Trump? The answer is simple: what was, and what is, the alternative? Not the ideal alternative, but the real-world alternative.

Consider where America was before Trump’s re-election.

Read it.

In biology classrooms across the world, students learn to roll their tongues. It’s almost a rite of passage, often folded into a lesson about Mendelian genetics. It’s supposed to be a simple demonstration: if you can curl your tongue into a tube, you probably have the “tongue-rolling gene.” If you can’t, you don’t. Blame your parents.

But what if that lesson is wrong? What if many other genetic myths are simply wrong as well (or at least misleading)? Simon Fisher, a geneticist at the Max Planck Institute, Nijmegen, recently pointed out just how persistent (and pervasive) some of these myths are. Let’s go through some of them.

Of course, ‘science’ can be just as wrong about these ‘myths’ as it often does about everything else. Whenever somebody says ‘science says’, feel free to not believe it without a lot of further proof.

Quillette.

Sex differences in many aspects of behavior and cognition are now well-established. These include women’s more communal (formation of intimate relationships) and men’s more agentic (goal achievement) approach to life, as well as men’s advantage in spatial abilities and women’s advantage in memory for personal experiences (episodic memory). Current debates focus on their origin and range from evolved biases to adherence to socially imposed gender roles.

Sex differences in brain organization and functions are the last frontier in this line of research, and their study is shaping up to be a ruckus. The results will eventually resolve the issue of the relative contributions of biological and cultural influences on sex differences. The associated scientific and social policy stakes are high and far-reaching. Minimal sex differences in brain organization and functions would help to affirm the importance of socially imposed gender roles and support the use of policy interventions to reduce sex differences in important social outcomes. Substantive biological contributions, on the other hand, would raise consequential questions about the wisdom of such interventions.

ZMan does a deep dive.

The term “deep state” remains a popular way for newly awakened normies to think of how their government operates. It is not the people on the ballot at election time who are running things, but a shadowy cabal of people who operate outside the bounds of the political system. Whenever something goes wrong, they naturally assume it is the work of the deep state. The problem is that the deep state, as most people imagine it, does not exist. It is a useful fiction.

The dismantling of USAID is a good example. The reporting on it in the unofficial media made it seem as if this entity was controlling large swaths of the government, when in fact it was just a money laundering scheme. Instead of cleaning cash acquired through illegal means, it put government cash in the hands of media activists, lobbyists, not-for-profits, and policy shops tied to permanent Washington. It was a clearing house and networking hub for permanent Washington.

In a way, the economy of permanent Washington is something like the economies of ancient city states. Those city states operated what is called palace economies where agricultural products flowed into the palace of the ruler and were then distributed back to the populace as needed. Farmers, craftsmen, and traders maintained their own economy, but a substantial portion of their economic output flowed into the palace to be redistributed as the ruler saw fit.

Lifehacker.

This week, the Out-of-Touch Guide grapples with an eternal question of man vs. beast, sees Gen Z throw a hilarious right cross at millennial decorating trends, contemplates whether refusing to wash your face is a skincare routine or a cry for help, and explains why serving booze at weddings has become a generational flashpoint.

Nothing is more predictable in ‘journalistic’ coverage of a person who has died, deservedly or not, than encomia from all of his or her Friends and Relations about what a really wonderful person the dead one was and how much he or she will be missed; in cases where the person was younger than Senior Citizen, this flattery will be chock full of descriptions of how the dead one was ‘immensely talented’ and ‘beloved by all’ and ‘had so much potential that is now sadly wasted. This is especially true of Aspiring Rappers who by some odd quirk of fate fall afoul of police (however could that happen?) and receive a lead exit ticket.

Once–just once–I’d like to read about such a situation where people said ‘Well, nobody really liked him’ or ‘Actually, he was pretty much a dick.’

Just once. That’s all I ask.