ZMan:

Back in the 1980’s when Reagan was riding high, public officials would often talk about the need to avoid bad precedents. Today’s exception to the rules for a good purpose could become tomorrow’s exception to the rules for bad purpose. Then you had Republicans who were developing their act where they say, “If we use our new power to serve our voters, we will be as bad as the Democrats!”

From a civic nationalist perspective, these sorts of things were correct. If one side abuses the rules to their advantage, then other sides will do the same and before long you have a man on a horse crossing a river he is never supposed to cross. On the other hand, if only one side gets to make exceptions, then the only precedent being set is that the side breaking the rules keeps winning.

That has been the shape of things since Watergate. The people we call the left run everything and they get to make exceptions. When they need a break and the other side gets to take a turn at the wheel, they make a fetish of the rules. This is the source of those vaunted principles the conservative love so much. The first principle is they follow the rules and everyone else cheats like hell.

Larry Correia.

Watching everybody I know on the left pontificating about the proper way to conduct audits, after getting their accounting degrees from the University of Internet this week, is absolute cringe for me.

Guys, listen, I say this with love… You don’t know dick about shit and it’s fucking embarrassing. Just stop. You sound like idiots.

So now, as a guy who used to be an auditor, who has defended companies from dozens of audits from different government agencies, I’ll try to correct some of your incredibly stupid NPC talking points you keep endlessly barfing up.

As somebody who worked in accounting for a number of years (my concentration in my MBA program was Audit), Larry is spot on.

Sure, this government program is an obvious scam to funnel tax dollars to bureaucrats and their NGO friends, so cat ladies in Arlington can collect $700k salaries at the “charity” run out of her multimillion dollar town home, but if we cut that a single puppy will die!

I feel bad for the Hostage Puppy. I really do. But don’t blame the auditors who are finding this shit, and don’t blame the tax payers who are tired of getting butt fucked. If you were honest you’d blame the bureaucrats and grifters who got us to this place.

What HE said….

Lifehacker, a Crust-adjacent source of advice.

Canceling memberships has become an everyday thing for a lot of people. We cycle through streaming services, we sign up for trial memberships, we find cheaper, better options for everything from television to gyms and jump whenever it makes financial, emotional, or psychological sense for us to do so. We’re pretty much at a point where the moment you sign up for a service or subscription, the countdown to your inevitable cancellation begins.

And everyone knows that canceling those subscriptions and services can be a challenge, even with new rules in place that are supposed to make it easier. If you’ve ever tried to cancel something and found it very difficult, or even outright failed to get it done, you were probably a victim of “dark patterns” and psychological tricks that companies use to stymie your efforts to dump them. In other words, you got sucked into their “cancellation funnel.”

If, of course, that’s what you want to do.

Sarah Hoyt.

Because life isn’t school. there isn’t “complete this study, then study this thing, then receive this degree, then–“

It’s a chaotic interaction of abilities and needs. In many ways unpredictable.

More unpredictable when idiots are playing with the over-structure of government and distorting the economy for their own agenda.

…

Fair is a market where they sell cattle.

There is no fair in life. There is doing what you can and fighting for survival.

Do that.

Your survival, your success is up to you.

The Atlantic, a Voice of the Crust.

Research suggests that pandemics are more likely to reduce rather than build trust in scientific and political authorities.

Perhaps because they bring home the fact that No One Is Coming To Save You. The establishment is eager to take your money and spend it on things they like, and eager to lie to you and pretend that they are acting for your benefit, but the ‘stress test’ of a pandemic or other natural disaster reveals pretty quickly what a scam and a grift it all is.

Read it.

Politicians in Europe are using the JD Vance and Trump external enemy excuse to disguise the existential problem of a system that is crumbling. The statist nightmare built around what politicians call “welfare state” has proven to be a subterfuge to multiply bureaucracy and create a dependent subclass.

The welfare state was never sustainable but was created as an affordable luxury that rich economies could finance with strong economic growth and a solid productive sector. However, European governments overlooked the necessity of fostering economic growth and productivity to finance the welfare state.

Furthermore, as left-wing populism permeated all segments of the European political landscape, politicians started to include more and more so-called “rights,” which became entitlement costs and subsidies, in a trend that led Europe to forget to create wealth and focus entirely on extractive and confiscatory policies.

If you allow poor people to vote, they will always vote to take money from non-poor people (‘Tax the rich!’ inevitably winds up being ‘Tax the middle and working class!’) to ‘redistribute’ to them.

I’ve often wondered about that myself.

Bloomberg.

I think a lot about what I sometimes call “abstract commodity space.” Sometimes you want to buy nickel or aluminum or coffee or cocoa to make batteries or beer cans or cappuccino or chocolate bars, so you go to some supplier and negotiate a contract for the delivery of a useful amount of a particular grade of the commodity to your factory. Sometimes, though, you want to bet on the price of nickel or aluminum or coffee or cocoa, to hedge some risk to your business or just as a speculative bet. So you buy commodity futures, financial assets that reflect the price of a commodity but don’t require you to store it or worry about it spoiling.

The way these futures often work is that there are big warehouses full of the commodity, and people write futures contracts that essentially transfer the entitlements to the commodities in the warehouse, without ever having to take them out. Your futures represent a claim on some nickel or coffee in a warehouse in abstract commodity space,1 and you don’t have to think much about the physical properties of the actual thing. The warehouse system has put a layer of abstraction on the messy commodity business, and you can treat the commodity as just a number on your computer screen.

We mostly talk about this when it breaks down, though. Sometimes the physical world tears through the layer of abstraction. The coffee or cocoa beans are stale, or someone discovers that the nickel in the warehouse is actually a bag of rocks.

Warning: This guy eventually starts wandering all over the map, so if you’re just interested in gold, stop when he starts talking about AI.

Read it.

In the latest, exciting episode of Liberty Doll, our eponymous heroine covers the grift of gun control in America. Thanks to DOGE and DataRepublican, we can see the network of government funds, funneled through “charitable” organizations, that fund what is clearly (and likely has always been) an astro-turf gun control movement.

Alma Boykin.

A Blast from the Past, from 2017. Some things have changed, others remain very current. Marx was still wrong.

The history of writing history, or “historiography,” includes a phase that is sometimes called the Whig School of history. Historians in the late 1700s and increasingly in the 1800s assumed that things were getting better, and had been improving since the Renaissance. If you were to draw their view of humanity as a line, it started on a high note with Creation, dropped into a hole after the fruit incident, climbed some, dipped with the Flood, crept up again to Greece and Rome, dipped after AD 475 “when the barbarians kicked in Rome’s door” as one of my mentors likes to say, then inched up again. The line begins to shoot near vertically after 1815 or so. Humanity was moving upwards and on wards and things could only get better. Of course, like most things in academia, counterarguments arose, mostly from the Marxist side of the aisle once there were enough Marxist historians to become well known.

The core of progressivism is the fundamental belief that PROGRESS IS INEVITABLE (hence the name ‘progressive’). This is why progressives are always trying to change things, because if progress is inevitable, then anything that resists change (no matter what that change might be) is Delaying Progress and therefore evil. This is also the backstory behind the common trope ‘real communism/socialism hasn’t been tried’, because if it had been tried, then things would be better (because progress is inevitable), THEREFORE since things didn’t get better then real communism/socialism hasn’t been tried. It all travels in a circle and there’s no way for them to get off of this particular merry-go-round.

ZMan draws from history.

This week Marco Rubio will meet with Russian officials to kick-off what Western media is calling Ukraine peace talks, but should properly be called normalization talks, as in the normalization of relations between Russia and America. The topic of Ukraine will be a part of the process, but not the focus of it. This is something that both sides have said regarding the hour-long talk between Trump and Putin. It was about much more than the war in Ukraine and how to end it.

This is what gets missed in Western media coverage. They are still operating by the old system where everything revolved around Ukraine. It was the lens through which all diplomatic relations were conducted. The new way of doing things is for the major powers to have a framework within which they can work out issues of common interest and settle issues where they are in dispute. For that to happen they must rebuild diplomatic relations between the major countries.

This is why Europe is not included. The EU is not a real place. It is a vague concept that has no sovereign authority. Ursula von der Leyen imagines herself as the empress of Europe, a managerial version of Napoleon, but in reality, she is a bureaucrat who failed up into a position that probably should not exist. As for the major powers of Europe, they will eventually play a role in the new security architecture, but they need to join everyone else in the 21st century before that can happen.

Read it.

DNA is often compared to a written language. The metaphor leaps out: Like letters of the alphabet, molecules (the nucleotide bases A, T, C and G, for adenine, thymine, cytosine and guanine) are arranged into sequences — words, paragraphs, chapters, perhaps — in every organism, from bacteria to humans. Like a language, they encode information. But humans can’t easily read or interpret these instructions for life. We cannot, at a glance, tell the difference between a DNA sequence that functions in an organism and a random string of A’s, T’s, C’s and G’s.

“It’s really hard for humans to understand biological sequence,” said the computer scientist Brian Hie (opens a new tab), who heads the Laboratory of Evolutionary Design at Stanford University, based at the nonprofit Arc Institute (opens a new tab). This was the impetus behind his new invention, named Evo: a genomic large language model (LLM), which he describes as ChatGPT for DNA.

The Other McCain.

Late Friday the political world was shaken when MAGA influencer Ashley St. Clair revealed that last year she gave birth to Elon Musk’s 13th offspring. Quickly, I sought out Rollo Tomassi’s take on this development, which was of course highly amusing.

Rollo (a pseudonym) has long pointed out that “Red Pill” is not ideology, but praxeology (“the study of human action and behavior”). It’s not about dictating what you should do, but rather about understanding what you actually do. And when you consider what Ashley St. Clair actually did — clawing her way to prominence in MAGA world, in order to get herself inseminated by The Richest Man in the World — you’ve got to tip the cap to Rollo, who has lectured endlessly about hypergamy as the motive force of female behavior. It doesn’t get more Red Pill than this.

Not a bad strategy on her part — Elon has always been generous to his offspring and their baby mamas.

I have all of the Rational Male books (a sixth is in progress) and recommend them without reservation. (Also recommended: The books by Aaron Clary.)

Read it.

“Are ultraprocessed foods harmful?

“Most research linking UPFs to poor health is based on observational studies, in which researchers ask people about their diets and then track their health over many years. In a large review of studies that was published in 2024, scientists reported that consuming UPFs was associated with 32 health problems, with the most convincing evidence for heart disease-related deaths, Type 2 diabetes and common mental health issues like anxiety and depression.”

And it is true, consumption of UPFs have been “associated” with a lot of health problems – through the kind offices of epidemiology. Remember:

World-class statistician, William “Matt” Briggs, author of the book “Uncertainty: The Soul of Modeling, Probability & Statistics”, tells us, in no uncertain terms, that: “Epidemiology is the field which officially mistakes correlations for causations.”

And that is the most basic statement we can make about the faddish battle against Ultraprocessed Foods.

Tyler Cowen.

House Republicans this week announced their “Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets.” This follows an executive order issued last month by President Donald Trump ordering the release of records about the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King. The broad idea is to get the federal government to reveal all its information about these assassinations as well as topics like Jeffrey Epstein, the origins of Covid-19 and UAPs (formerly known as UFOs).

Rather than speculate about whether Trump and Congress will follow through, I would like to focus on the question of how this disclosure process should [ought to] work.

Read it.

An American-Israeli released from Gaza during the current Israel-Hamas ceasefire is exhorting President Donald Trump to press for the release of the remaining hostages.

“President Trump, you are the reason I am home alive. You are the reason I was reunited with my beloved wife, four children and five grandchildren. Thank you,” Siegel says in a video released by his family and hostage advocacy groups. “Thank you for your continued fight against terror and for your bold leadership that has brought me and many others back home, to our families, to safety and to security.”

Siegel, 65, moved to Israel from his native North Carolina as a young adult and was abducted from his home on Kibbutz Kfar Aza along with his wife Aviva, who was released during a weeklong ceasefire in November 2023. He remained in dire conditions for 14 more months.

Read it.

Funny how that works.

Alma Boykin.

Archaeologists get frustrated when they know something should be there, but no records have been found yet, and what they are looking for doesn’t survive. Grain was traded in the Levant and Mesopotamia, but unless there are sales receipts, or the granary burned down and so preserved the contents, we’ll never know how much and to whom. Ditto fabric. Textiles were probably one of the largest category of long-distance trade, based on later patterns of exchange, but again, unless it burned and archaeologists find traces, no one will ever know.

One of the things archaeologists have peen puzzling over for a few decades is, “What went where that we can’t see?” Food is one of those things. Sometimes the containers survived, like the famous amphorae of the Classical world that one finds all over, including along shipping routes. Apparently some of the wine was tested for quality by the shipping crew while enroute. Olive pits are another thing that sometime survive, along with the amphorae for the oil (and perfume flasks, although those are more rare.) Dried fruit might have been shipped as well, based on cuneiform tablets accidentally baked hard when a city was sacked. Dried meat? Beer? Well, probably not beer, because it didn’t keep well before hops was added as an ingredient. Vegetables of some sort? Probably locally, but how far is local? We’ll never know, unless charred bits are found that are clearly not from the area where they are excavated.

Quilette.

The thirteenth of February 2025 marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of the last printed Peanuts comic strip, a closure which eerily coincided with the death at age seventy-seven of its author, Charles M. Schulz, on the same day. In hindsight, Peanuts was not just another highly successful cultural product but one of the last single-authored cultural products to be internationally successful on a grand scale.

Schulz’s drawn characters—along with their catchphrases like “Good grief!” and “You blockhead!”—have become as immortal as Waiting for Godot’s Vladimir and Estragon, Catch-22’s Yossarian, and Charlie Chaplin’s Tramp. But his real achievement lies not in any single comic strip or character, but in the sheer extent of his fifty-year body of original work. Between October 1950 and December 1999, Schulz drew almost 18,000 unique Peanuts episodes, in addition to innumerable Peanuts posters, calendars, greeting cards, and advertisements. Peanuts is a modern saga, or, as illustrator Ivan Brunetti put it, “an epic poem made up entirely of haikus.” A handful of other twentieth- and twenty-first century works have enjoyed a similar longevity, but few or none of them have stemmed so exclusively from the creativity of one individual, and yet become so familiar, day by day, over a period of five decades.

She’s got a point.

ZMan juggles some labels.

One of the many interesting aspects of the Trump era has been the collapse of what was called conservatism in America and the rise of a new coalition to replace it as the dominant force in the Republican Party. Most pundits have been happy to call it Trumpism or MAGA, as they hope it is temporary. Others have tried to jam it into the populist bucket, despite the fact it is not a populist movement. Beyond these superficial attempts at labeling, not much has been said about it.

Not everyone in the coalition is thrilled by what they are seeing. Many older conservatives, the paleo variety, are happy to see Conservative Inc. head off to bankruptcy, but they are a bit uncomfortable sharing a pew with people like Robert Kennedy Jr. or Tulsi Gabbard. They wince when Tucker Carlson gets along with old school lefties like Jimmy Dore or Aaron Maté. They spent their lives on the opposite side of these people and now they share the same movement.

In fairness, it is even more difficult for the old school lefties, because for them, politics defines their life. That means they are now faced with supporting that which they were sure was evil until not so long ago. It also means their conception of evil may have been wrong, which means their conception of themselves was wrong. This is why it is difficult for an ideologue to adjust to new evidence. Unlike the non-ideologue, such adjustment requires a reexamination of their soul.

…

For as long as anyone has been alive, the consensus in American politics has been the radicalism at the heart of progressivism. Egalitarianism, universalism, and the blank slate are the three legs of this ideological stool. What motivates and justifies using this stool to smash up American society and go abroad to smash up other cultures is the intense belief that they are commanded by history or history’s God to impose this ideology on the people of the world.

Victor Davis Hanson.

There’s a lot of controversy about Elon Musk, and let’s just dispel some of it right at the start. He is not a freelancer. He was appointed a government official. Donald Trump, by an executive order, created the Department of Government Efficiency, and he made Elon Musk the head of it, along with Vivek Ramaswamy, who now has resigned.

Elon Musk has statutory authority. This Department of Government Efficiency is not a Cabinet agency. He does not have to be approved by Congress. And it only is going to last until July 4, 2026. It’s not a permanent agency, but he has the same power, or lack of such, as the national security adviser, who does not have to be confirmed by the U.S. Senate.

…

As far as the executive orders that created the DOGE program and eliminated the U.S. Agency for International Development—that was perfectly legal in itself. USAID was created by John F. Kennedy in 1961 by an executive order. There was a statutory direction for the president to disperse foreign aid into a comprehensive body, but it didn’t say USAID—he could do whatever he wanted.

Read it.  (Not the Babylon Bee.)

Deal. We’ll give them $50 and a first round draft pick.

ZMan does a reversion.

One of the things lost in the excitement of the first month of the Trump administration is the pending reform of the FBI. When Kash Patel was grilled by the Senate, he repeatedly made clear that reforming the agency was his top priority. This is one reason Senate Democrats are stalling his nomination. This paramilitary wing of the Blob is calling in every favor to preserve itself. That lawsuit seeking to prevent the DOJ from getting the names of the J6 agents is a similar move.

There is little questioning the underlying premise of the reform cause. The FBI has lost all credibility with the public after a string of scandals. Framing people is a terrible thing but creating elaborate traps for not-so-bright people, as we saw in the Michigan kidnapping hoax, is monstrous. Most people do not know this has been common practice for decades, but many people know it. Of course, you have the outlandish behavior of the FBI during the first Trump term.

The topic of reform starts with looking at how an organization reached the point where reform is required to save it. That is where the FBI is now. Many people think it might be best to just close it down entirely. The few necessary things it does could be transferred to other agencies or maybe to a new agency with a severely limited portfolio, something like an FBI-lite. When forty percent of the agency was used to go after the J6 people over the last four years, the agency is rotten to the core.

Watch it.

Quillette goes Red Pill.

Read it.

In the coming years, AI systems will have a major impact on the ways people work. For that reason, we’re launching the Anthropic Economic Index, an initiative aimed at understanding AI’s effects on labor markets and the economy over time.

The Index’s initial report provides first-of-its-kind data and analysis based on millions of anonymized conversations on Claude.ai, revealing the clearest picture yet of how AI is being incorporated into real-world tasks across the modern economy.

AI is going to be important from now on; no way around it. The question is: Will it be useful?

Read it.

Frugality is a virtue. The art of doing more with less, making sharp trade-offs, and keeping waste at bay so the good stuff – innovation, growth, maybe even a little joy – has room to thrive. Any engineer worth their salt knows the power of an elegant, efficient solution. A few well-placed optimizations can turn a sluggish system into a rocket.

But frugality has a dark twin – a reckless, shortsighted impostor that mistakes cost-cutting for efficiency and penny-pinching for wisdom. Enter frupidity, or stupid frugality – the obsessive drive to save money in ways that ultimately cost far more in lost productivity, morale, and sanity. It’s the engineering equivalent of “optimizing” a car by removing the brakes to improve gas mileage.

I like the Rule of Twenty: If you run across something you’re not using that can be replaced in twenty minutes or less for twenty dollars or less, throw it out.

Read it.

After a set of strict emissions limits was voted down at the polls on Sunday, Switzerland’s Young Greens—who unsurprisingly brought the proposals forward—complained that “defenders of the status quo” had been victorious. Clearly, the opposite is the case: Swiss voters signaled a small yet decisive shift away from Europe’s destructive green drive.

Brussels is, however, more likely to pay attention to those Swiss lawmakers desperately searching for other ways to legislate ‘for the environment’—and, as issues surrounding the EU’s Green Deal show, against competitiveness.

Among other measures included in the ‘Environmental Responsibility’ proposals, voters rejected reducing greenhouse gases emitted through consumption to 10% of their 2018 levels within the next decade. Bloomberg says they did so—with 69.8% voting against, no less, and with none of the country’s 26 cantons voting in favour—because of “economic concerns.”

Alma Boykin.

I’ve been reading about the English government’s ideas for making England Net-Zero by … ten to twenty-five years from now, depending on the version of the plan. In addition to phasing out hydrocarbon fuels (diesel, gasoline, natural gas), it requires the reduction of agriculture by ten percent or so, and installing lots of solar farms and wind turbines in order to eliminate “dirty”sources of electricity like coal and gas-fired power plants. Part of the thinking behind this taxation aspect of this environmental plan is to redistribute the farmland away from the traditional owners and encourage newer families to move out of the larger cities and take up farming. Higher-intensity agriculture will also be needed, in order to replace the crops and livestock that will no longer be grown or raised because of the Net-Zero requirements.

I‘m a conservationist, not an environmentalist. Team Wise Use is my group. I”m not opposed to preservation of parts of the landscape and wildlife. I’m not opposed to careful development of other resources, either. The key is the balance, and thinking long term. We as a society have seen solar farms and wind turbines in action for several decades now, and … they are not living up to the ideal of producing electricity efficiently for large-scale applications. Small scale? Absolutely, and wind energy works very well in some places and applications, solar likewise. But it has not scaled up thus far, and the tradeoffs in damage to the landscape and biota should give one pause.

Read it.

This fall, prospective students and parents should be looking at university recruitment materials with one question in mind: what exactly is a university education worth in the AGI era?

The AI systems of 2024 were tools, limited to tasks like writing essays or analyzing data. Artificial General Intelligence is different. The AGI systems launching now can reason, learn, and solve problems across all domains, at or above human level. If universities cannot articulate in detail how their faculty exceeds AGI capabilities, what value are they offering to tuition-paying students? Traditional arguments about the value of a college education collapse without faculty expertise.

The usual, comfortable rhetoric about “irreplaceable” human elements of education—mentorship, hands-on learning, community building, and critical thinking—might suffice for a four-year social networking summer camp, and some parents may still value that. But in the AGI era, the only defensible reason for universities to remain in operation is to offer students an opportunity to learn from faculty whose expertise surpasses current AI. Nothing else makes sense.

Marketing that touts traditional benefits of a university education while ignoring AGI actively harms the sector, suggesting that higher education either fails to grasp the AGI revolution or is trying to hide from it. Universities must instead lead with brutal honesty: students should pay precisely for the “last mile” of human knowledge that surpasses AGI’s capabilities. The true value of a university lies in faculty who can offer advanced education, mentorship, and inspiration at the highest level, while every other aspect of college life becomes a secondary consideration that no longer justifies tuition on its own.

ZMan does some structural analysis.

As expected, the lawsuits are quickly piling up as the regime tries to buy time to regroup after the initial attacks from the Trump administration. There are multiple cases involving the Treasury, all aimed at preventing Trump appointees from doing their jobs, at least without permission from the court. There is one case involving the FBI, where the judge is asked to stop the Justice Department from looking into J6 cases. There is at least one case challenging the buyout system.

All these cases have been launched by activists trying to halt the Trump agenda, but they all have something important in common. They revolve around a set of core questions about these executive agencies. Who controls these agencies, by what means do they control them and by whose authority? The activists are challenging the Trump admin on the claim that these are independent agencies. They do not report to the President, so he cannot take these actions.

The trouble with that is there is nothing in the Constitution defining a fourth branch of government under which these agencies are organized. At best, it is a bit of make-believe Washington has indulged since Nixon. The mythology of Watergate says Nixon used these agencies to terrorize his political opponents, so he was driven from the temple of the people. Ever since, permanent Washington has waved around the bloody shirt whenever they did not like what a President was doing.

New York Magazine.

Although it may not look like it when you walk into your artist friend’s Cobble Hill brownstone, there are limits to how much a parent can bestow on their child. Designed to thwart the wealthy’s attempts to circumvent the estate tax, which after death gobbles up to 40 percent of one’s assets over $13.99 million, the IRS’s “gift tax” stipulates that each taxpayer can give only $19,000 per year to any individual, including their kids. Any more than that and a parent must file Form 709, which alerts the IRS that the giver is eating into the lifetime maximum (which is also $13.99 million) they can grant to one person tax free. Yet rich parents often want to give more. Here are the (sometimes barely legal) ways they get it done.

Whenever the statists of the world find a program that goes against basic human nature (prohibition, drug laws, inheritance taxes), people will make or find a way to get around it. As there are more non-statists than statists in the world, guess who eventually wins?

The problem is, when governments enact stupid laws that almost everyone tries to get around (or just ignore), it undermines the socially-inculcated respect for law that supports such things as the aversion to murder, rape, arson, robbery, etc. This is not good. Prohibition gave us organized crime. Drug laws gave us murderously violant drug cartels. Inheritance (and gift) taxation gave us a vast army of accountants and lawyers that arguably contribute very little to actual human progress.

When I was in law school taking a class on basic tax law, our professor came in the first day carrying a stack of paper about two feet tall. He put it on his desk and said, “This is the Internal Revenue Code. It runs about then thousand pages.” He picked up the top sheet and showed it to us. “This tells you what tax you have to pay.” He put that on the desk and put his hand on the rest of the stack. “This tells you how to get around paying that tax.” He patted the stack and said, “This is what we teach here.” And that about sums it up.

BEAR IN MIND that trade always balances — Crustian talk about ‘balance of trade deficits’ to the contrary notwithstanding — and if China ships more goods to the U.S. than the U.S. ships to China, then the balance is made up by China taking dollars from the U.S. that they aren’t spending on U.S. goods.

Read it.

The most dramatic narrative shift in this post-lockdown period has been the flip in the perceptions of government itself. For decades and even centuries, government was seen as the essential bulwark to defend the poor, empower the marginalized, realize justice, even the playing field in commerce, and guarantee rights to all.

I’ve always wondered about that.

Read it.

In total, 78 convoys sailed to or returned from Soviet ports, but it was only on 19 December 2012, after lobbying for sixteen years, that David Cameron’s government finally awarded convoy veterans their own official Arctic Campaign Star, by which time an estimated 400 were still alive. In 2015, the Kremlin subsequently awarded these ancient mariners their Ushakov Medal (named after the patron saint of the Russian Navy), and until recently they appeared as honoured guests at May Day parades in Red Square. Alas, too late for Able Seaman MacLean who died in 1987, but he would have heartily approved. So it is each winter, that I picture and honour the crews who took part in those Arctic runs, a job I would not have wished for all the lottery wins on earth.

J. D. Vance:

My kids, god willing, will be risk takers. They won’t think constantly about whether a flippant comment or a wrong viewpoint will follow them around for the rest of their lives.

They will tell stupid jokes. They will develop views that they later think are wrong or even gross. I made mistakes as a kid, and thank God I grew up in a culture that encouraged me to grow and learn and feel remorse when I screwed up and offer grace when others did.

I don’t worry about my kids making mistakes, or developing views they later regret. I don’t even worry that much about trolls on the internet. You know what I do worry about, Ro?

That they’ll grow up to be a US Congressm[a]n who engages in emotional blackmail over a kid’s social media posts.

ZMan:

I think it was Charles Beard who argued that urbanization leads to dependence because people in urban areas grow used to the infrastructure. The daily interface with government supplied services results in those services becoming a part of the person’s conception of their life. They cannot imagine living without them, which leads them to support the politics that defend this system.

It may also cause them to view any threat to those systems, even a temporary one like a snowstorm, as an existential one. Since who they are is tangled up in the ecosystem of urban life, that which threatens changes to that ecosystem, or even parts of it, is the same as a threat on them. The reaction to Covid followed this pattern. Urban areas with lots of services had a greater panic reaction to Covid.

This explains why radicals hate rural people. In their mind, the self-sufficient should not exist, so there is something dangerous about them. The reason that chubby weirdo Matthew Yglesias wants a billion people is so there can be no rural areas and therefore no independent people. His fantasy world is one in which everyone is a helpless child, dependent on the benevolent state.

Get Zman’s green-door content on SubscribeStar.

Read it.

Something truly revolutionary is taking place in Washington.

President Donald Trump not only won an election; he’s fundamentally changing the way the federal government does business. Unlike the early days of his first term, Trump is directly targeting the nodes of real power in the nation’s capital. He’s launching a multifront assault on the Regime.

Even Politico, a curiously reliable regime-defending publication, lamented Trump’s ruthless effectiveness.

The American Mind.

If 21st-century Republicans have an idol, a graven image we collectively worship, it is Gross Domestic Product. All discussion about the flourishing of our nation is reduced to GDP, and its increase is seen as an ironclad refutation of anyone who questions whether America is, in fact, flourishing. But GDP, as today calculated, is largely fake, disconnected from the actual production of value. Worse, flourishing-as-quantity is a destructive way to view our society. It was once commonplace that the value of very many things, a mother’s love or a scarlet sunset, was immense, but unmeasurable. We have forgotten this, to our detriment. To truly make America great again, a crucial first step is dethroning GDP as a measure of our greatness.

Yes, there is some benefit to having in our quiver of analytical tools an aggregate way to view additions to economic value, the production of new goods and services. Think of 20 men and women who do nothing except eat and drink what is at hand. They produce no value; the GDP of their little society is zero. If, however, they begin to produce anything, goods or services, they produce value. How to measure such production has, however, generated different approaches, and the method we use today, while it serves our desire for simple ways of viewing the world, conceals truth in order to serve political ends.

Read it.

One factor that truly sets the Trump Administration apart from all other modern Republican Presidencies is the acknowledgment of the culture war. The leftists have been waging this war for at least 50 years and GOP leaders have mostly dismissed it as trivial compared to politics. It’s the reason why we came within a razor’s edge of total moral relativism and degeneracy under the Biden Administration. The left has been normalizing the hatred of basic American principles for generations.

Part of that effort has been the introduction of open borders ideology and mass illegal immigration. I consider this a kind of “final stage” of the leftist/globalist agenda – If you can demonize western culture to the point of self hatred, then people won’t care when you saturate the west with third-world migrants and put the final nail in the coffin.

Illegal aliens don’t want to assimilate, they want to pillage and if possible to conquer. This is why you see hundreds of Mexican flags flying at every migrant protest march; they have no interest in becoming American, they only want access to American wealth. They look at the US citizenry as rubes and easy targets for plunder.

There is also the danger of cultural replacement. Many migrants from Latin American identify with the Marxist “La Raza” ideology, which asserts that America is “stolen land” that they have an ethnic claim to. The globalists know this and use mass migration as a weapon, opening the gates and making it easy for the invasion to happen. As we have seen in Europe and the UK, migrant hordes are like a mercenary army perfect for oppressing native citizens and preventing future rebellion against multicultural erasure.

Migrants who come from countries with a more extensive welfare state than the U.S. (but which maybe can’t afford the level of benefits that the U.S provides) are a natural constituency for the Party of Free Stuff, which (consciously or unconsciously) presents a strong motive for Democrats (and other socialists, like Britain’s Labour Party) to open the border and welcome all comers.

Victor Davis Hanson.

Hanson argues that Trump tariffs aren’t intended to support inefficient American industries, but rather to put pressure on other countries that are profiting from trade with the U.S. but pursuing anti-U.S. policies politically. We’ve seen this work with Mexico, and it appears to be working with Canada. Can the E. U. be far behind?

Curtis Yarvin:

All real-estate titles have war as a genesis block. War has consequences. At least, in normal world, war has consequences. In the Middle East, we tested the idea that war should have no consequences. The result: 80 years of war, with occasional cease-fires. That’s crackpot world—what my friend Tarik Sadouma calls the “Peace Fetish.” It all belongs in the trashcan with USAID.