Read it.

Democrats–best politicians money can buy.

Lifehacker.

Most of us have a love-hate relationship with our cars. We love our vehicles because they represent freedom (and economic necessity, if you rely on one to get to work or do your grocery shopping), but we hate how much they cost—and the fact that you never actually stop paying for them. It costs an average of $1,452 every year just to keep your vehicle running, and the overall cost of owning a car is a whopping $6,684 annually.

As crucial as vehicle maintenance is in terms of making sure your car is reliable, people tend to skip an awful lot of it. If all you do every year is the basics—changing the oil and engine filters in a standard tune-up—you’re skipping a bunch of maintenance that only seems less important. Here are the vehicle maintenance steps you should definitely not skip.

This advice is aimed at women, since men typically do this stuff automatically.

Fun fact: Jeff Somers is a highly-regarded (by me, at least) speculative fiction author and noted connoisseur of whiskies.

Cat Rotator’s Quarterly.

It takes an academic to do it, but it can be done. I filled my Buzzword Bingo card twice in the abstract alone.

Before people start looking to see if the blog has been hacked, allow me to back up a little bit. Many years ago, I found a book on my parents’ shelves entitled “The Bog People” by someone named Glob. He was one of the first archaeologists/anthropologists to write about the bodies found in bogs in Northern Europe. He also led the first professional excavation of the tanned remains of humans that turned up when people were digging peat and other things in swampy areas. The book had flaws, and leaned a little too much on Tacitus and other written sources, but someone had to start somewhere. It remains the foundational text on the topic. The idea stuck, and I’ve actually gotten to see four of the sets of remains. They are fascinating, if rather disconcerting, somewhat like Ötzi (the body from the ice).

I‘m revisiting the topic for various reasons, and working my way through a set of academic papers about wetland sacrifices and bog bodies and so on. Some are quite useful, some rather thought provoking (why do so many of the water sacrifices in Denmark also have lots of small, pale stones on or near the offerings?). And then there’s the one about posthuman theories of othering bodies, and bringing different theoretical frameworks about non-human nature, animal-human transferrences, and so on to the archaeology and anthropology of wetland sacrifices. Once I waded into the paper (pun fully intended), there were no surprises, just long words for concepts I already knew, written in a very dull, jargon-laced way. Gee, people back then decided that some humans weren’t fully people, and so could be abused and sacrificed. Or they could be included in burials against their will, as servants/slaves for the dead (and probably as ways to propitiate the dead and hurry them to the ancestors, in some cases). And sometimes animals stood in for humans as ritual offerings, but a few times it might have been the reverse. Cultures viewed outsiders and people with obvious differences as being inferior, perhaps. Gee.

Read it.

Why Trump is not, in fact, really Hitler.

TDS: The rise of end times fascism (The Guardian)

ZMan:

It is entirely possible that we passed the point of no return and therefore no amount of reform, not even authoritarian reform, will save us. The population will need a great reset before civilized government can return to North America. Maybe it is the organized deportation of the crazies to someplace not here or maybe Mother Nature steps in with a real plague. Perhaps it will require organized violence in the context of societal collapse to fix the gene pool.

Maybe that is why the fertility rate is collapsing. The mutational load has reached the point in our species where nature looks at us as a genetic dead end. We are like panda bears. It has evolved down a dead end in terms of its habitat, so it is dying out. Similarly, humans have evolved to the point where we can no longer maintain cooperative societies, which is our natural habitat. The presence of so many crazies signals, at best, a great culling of the human herd.

Makes me look like an optimist.

Read it.

President Donald Trump entered to a standing ovation and cheers from a crowd of thousands attending a UFC event on Saturday night, shaking hands with supporters against a backdrop of fans waving his trademark MAGA hats.

Just as Trump entered, he greeted podcast host Joe Rogan, who sat to the right of the president. On the other side of Trump sat Elon Musk, billionaire and chief of the Department of Government Efficiency. Trump, who accented his dark suit with a bright yellow tie, pumped his fist in the air, prompting cheers to strains of “Taking Care of Business.”

He brought along several members of his administration and White House team, including Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., FBI Director Kash Patel, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard and White House communications aides Steven Cheung and Taylor Budowich. Secretary of State Marco Rubio and U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, also joined Trump for UFC 314.

Read it.

Have you ever had trouble taking in information in a noisy environment? A new study suggests that tapping your fingers in a steady rhythm could help you ‘tune in’ through the noise.

The researchers designed a series of experiments to uncover the role of movement in understanding speech, “building on the theory that the motor system is not merely an executor of movements,” they write, “but actively contributes to the integration and reuse of temporal information.”

Read it.

And has been since the fall of Soviet Communism, the threat that it was intended to counter. It stands as a poster child for Reagan’s adage that the closest thing to immortality is a government program.

NATO is a corpse. All that remains is the grotesque performance art of a diplomatic zombie stumbling from summit to summit, mouthing tired clichés about “shared values” and “burden sharing,” even as its core strategic logic lies rotting beneath the surface. The Atlantic Alliance, once the steel scaffolding of Western security, has become a hollow ritual. Its military readiness is an illusion. Its political cohesion is fraying. Its future, if it has one, lies not in revival—but in reinvention or replacement.

…

NATO’s death was not caused by Donald Trump, though he may soon become its undertaker. Nor was it caused by Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, though that war has exposed the Alliance’s hollowness in ways no war game or communique ever could. The real cause lies in decades of European free-riding, American strategic drift, and a foundational lie at the heart of the Alliance: the idea that an empire can masquerade as a collective defense pact without consequences.

The Foundry.

In the ongoing debate about the role of government in addressing societal issues, a crucial misconception often surfaces on one side: The desire to help others equates to a mandate for state intervention.

Advocates for increased government action frequently ignore the vital distinction between voluntary assistance and coercive mandates. The belief that government can—or should—serve as the ultimate arbiter of compassion neglects the fundamental principle that true generosity arises from individual choice rather than compulsion.

Those advocating for increased government intervention often exhibit a profound misunderstanding about the nature of help. They seem to believe that the mere desire to assist equates to a moral imperative for the state to act—often through coercive means. This reliance on government as the ultimate solution tends to obscure an essential principle: the freedom of individuals to choose how, or whether, to help.

Government is, at best, a necessary evil, and that evil ought to be mitigated as far as possible by restricting its activities to the essentials: Keep people save and keep people honest. Anything beyond that is illegitimate.

Read it.

In an article published today at the New York Post, journalist Emily Crane described the Darién Gap route as a “ghost town” after just four months of the illegal migration crackdown from the Trump administration.

ZMan explains it all to you.

Warren Buffet famously said, “Only when the tide goes out do you discover who’s been swimming naked.” The point of this metaphor is that in economic downturns you learn who has been taking excessive risks. Another way of putting it is that in easy times, everyone can be a hero or a genius. This has been the case for the American financial system for over thirty years. As long as credit money kept expanding, everyone had a chance to look like a financial genius.

This explains the prevalence of people in the financial media who somehow get everything wrong but maintain their status as experts. The most notable of this sort is Jim Cramer who has made a career out of being outlandishly wrong. Paul Krugman wrote a column for years about the economy, despite never being right about it. These are two famous examples, but the commentariat is littered with these types. As long as the arrow kept going up, being wrong was good money.

The trouble is that the entire financial industry is built on this premise. Being wrong comes with no penalty, because wrongness rarely comes with a cost. Sure, the MegaBrain Capital Fund might not perform as well as random guessing, but because the arrow always goes up, even the bad bets pay off. This also means anyone spouting random gibberish can present himself as an expert. Tens of thousands of mortgage payments, maybe hundreds of thousands, rest on this assumption.

Babylon Bee.

Aye, there’s the rub … so to speak.

The Economist, a Voice of the Crust.

Dzaleka’s strange economy exposes the variety of ways humans go about spending even very modest endowments.

It is partly for this reason that confined economies fascinate researchers. The most famous is Stalag VII-A. The Nazi prisoner-of-war camp, in modern-day Poland, was home to Richard Radford, a British army officer. After the war, on returning to Cambridge University, Radford wrote a paper describing how the camp’s rudimentary cigarette trade evolved into a specialised economy that used cigarettes as the currency by which the value of every other available good was expressed. Much as in Dzaleka, work was scarce and everyone’s endowments—packages sent by the Red Cross, a charity—were pretty much equal.

The camp’s economy allowed Radford to challenge an old economic assumption. The “labour theory of value” is most commonly associated with Karl Marx, but classical liberal economists such as Adam Smith and David Ricardo also believed that the price of a good mostly reflected how much work it had taken to produce it, or the perception of that work among buyers and sellers. In Stalag VII-A nobody worked, and everything still had value. The price of butter came from its scarcity relative to how much was sought, not the number of hours a milkmaid had spent churning.

The Labor Theory of Value is an outgrowth of mediaeval Just Price Theory, in which philosophers and theologians desperately scrabbled to figure out some way that the price of something is related in some way to something outside of the market.

It’s wrong, and it’s always been wrong. You can dig a hole and fill it up again and again, but all that labor hasn’t added a thing to the value of that patch of ground, and is totally unrelated to its price.

There is a distinction (which even prize-winning economists–yeah, I’m looking at you, Paul Krugman–don’t seem to grasp) between ‘value’ and ‘price’, and price is always determined by the market: What someone else is willing to pay in trade for your stuff. That is the thing and the whole of the thing.

As one might expect, this comes as a surprise to the people at The Economist, a Voice of the Crust.

Stewart Slater: “We recognise few greater injustices than people not doing what we want.”

Quillette

The history of human flourishing is a story of technological progress. From the taming of fire to the Industrial Revolution, our species has found ways to reshape the world, turning scarcity into abundance and hardship into comfort. Yet, when it comes to some of today’s concerns—climate change, food security, deforestation—the instinctive response is rarely technological optimism. Instead, the prevailing narrative emphasises social change: reducing consumption, altering human behaviour, and enforcing collective restraint.

Why do so many people reflexively favour social solutions—carbon taxes, regulations, lifestyle changes—while discounting the promise of technological breakthroughs? The answer lies in our evolutionary past and in the way our minds have been shaped to solve problems. As psychologist William von Hippel has noted, humans evolved for social solutions rather than technological ones. That cognitive legacy continues to influence how we approach modern challenges, often leading us to dismiss the very innovations that could provide scalable, lasting solutions.

For most of our history, human survival depended less on technological ingenuity and more on cooperation and social cohesion. Our ancestors did not invent their way out of problems; they solved them through alliances, negotiations, and collective rulemaking. Food shortages, for instance, were addressed not by developing advanced agricultural techniques—those came much later—but by rationing resources, redistributing wealth within the tribe, and reinforcing norms against hoarding.

Steve Graham.

I see a lot of people, including RINO’s, criticizing Trump for increasing tariffs on foreign goods. The ignorance is amazing.

No one can answer this simple question for me: if tariffs are bad for an economy, how come they’ve been so good for the economies of the countries that put unfair tariffs on our exports?

How can it be that a practice that benefits all of our economic enemies can harm us when we do it to a lesser degree?

Another question: since Trump’s tariffs are tied directly to the tariffs and barriers imposed by other countries, if we want to get rid of them, why don’t we pressure the other countries instead of attacking our president? They can lower OUR tariffs in an hour by lowering their own.

I don’t know how well Trump’s tariff fight will work out, but I can’t see any reason at all why it shouldn’t be a whopping success. Sure, it’s hard on the stock market. Temporarily. Real investors know that the success of a market is measured in decades, not days. This is probably a great time to buy depressed stocks sold off by people with weak hands. “Weak hands” is the term career investors use to ridicule those who sell their stocks every time they dip. The people who buy high and sell low.

The US has the largest internal market in the world, meaning we have the big stick to beat everyone else with. Liars say the EU is the biggest, but that’s propaganda. The US is the biggest in terms of money spent, and that’s all that counts. The EU’s market is about half the size of ours. If you want to sell stuff to foreigners, you want to sell in the US. When the US blocks you, you’re like a diaper manufacturer who can’t sell to Walmart. You’re done.

Let’s see how we’re doing in 6 months.

CNN, a Voice of the Crust.

Republicans are growing anxious about an emerging Texas primary engulfing one of their longest-serving senators, fearful that a hugely expensive intraparty feud will have major ramifications across the map in next year’s midterms.

And they want President Donald Trump to stop it.

Behind the scenes, Senate GOP leaders have personally asked Trump to back Sen. John Cornyn, who has occupied his seat for more than two decades and narrowly lost his bid to become Senate majority leader last fall.

John Cornyn is the Mitt Romney of Texas. The fact that he has a primary challenger who could win is all you need to know.

ZMan:

One of the amusing bits this week is how the kooks and lunatics all suddenly sounded like Milton Freidman when Trump announced his tariff policy. Suddenly people who often claim to be Marxists and anarchists were praising the glories of free markets. Some have enough self-awareness to see the problem, so they claim they oppose the tariffs because they are nationalist and you know who was a nationalist, so tariffs are fascism or something.
Most lack self-awareness, so they just screamed at the internet. The yesterday men of conservatism put on their knit ties and started chanting about Reagan. What they forget is Reagan used tariffs to protect American industry, despite opposing tariffs on theoretical grounds. In theory, a tariff free world might be the best, but we do not live in theory. We live in reality. The yesterday men always leave that part out when chanting about Reagan.
It all points to the fact that the old post-Cold War politics are spent. The people on the so-called left and right have nothing to offer. The kooks who used to distinguish themselves from the official left by championing populist items now oppose those items. They have no answer to Trump’s agenda because they have nothing to offer as an alternative. In the new politics, Trump is the radical overthrowing the old order and the self-styled radicals are the entrenched conservative interests.
None of this is to say the Trump agenda is flawless or that it will work. We are just getting started, so we shall have to wait and see how it unfolds. The basic scheme, however, is sound. American tariff policy will match the tariff schemes of other countries. If Canada wants to do business with us, they must negotiate a tariff schedule with Washington. It may be radically different from the one worked out with China, but Canada is not China.
The foundation of what Trump is doing is pragmatism. A good deal for Americans with regards to trading with Canada will always be different from what is good for Americans in a China deal. Rather than adhere to an ideological framework, economic policy will be situational. What is good now may not be good a year from now, so a year from now you will do something else. The radical idea at the heart of it all is realism. In an age drenched in ideology, reality is a radical idea.

Read it.

Ladd’s Arizona ranch shares 10.5 miles with the border of Mexico, and during the four years of the Biden administration, about 50 illegal aliens crossed through Ladd’s property daily, and sometimes that number rose to as many as 200, he told The Daily Signal.

“As soon as Trump got elected, it started slowing down,” Ladd said, adding that as of the beginning of March, Border Patrol told him they are “catching three a day, with no getaways” on his ranch.

Ladd attributes the dramatic decline of illegal border crossings through his ranch to Trump’s reimposing the “Remain in Mexico” policy and the “consequences” illegal aliens now face when they are caught illegally crossing the border. Illegal aliens who have criminal records “don’t want to take a chance” of being caught and risk being deported or imprisoned, he said.

Read it.

When we buy more goods and services from a foreign country than they buy from us in a given time period, we have a trade deficit with them. That means we are sending them little pieces of green paper (or more usually, digital bits) that represent a future claim on wealth. They can’t eat the green paper or the digital bits (i.e. dollars). They can’t build anything with them. We are getting valuable products in exchange for a future promise. Thus we can consume more now than we would in the absence of a trade deficit.

What do the recipient countries do with the pieces of green paper or digital bits? Since the dollar is the world’s reserve currency, they often use them to purchase goods and services from another country. So Taiwan might give us advanced semiconductors in exchange for digital bits and then pass the digital bits on to Saudi Arabia for oil. Then Saudi Arabia might use them to buy petroleum engineering services from the US, at which time we would be obligated to make good on the promise we made to Taiwan that those digital bits would be worth something. Because dollars flow around the globe, our trade deficit with a particular country is of no concern to us.

Our overall trade deficit is a good thing because it allows us to consume more goods and services now. Even better: because we have the world’s reserve currency, many of these dollars circulate overseas and have not yet (and may never be) used to demand goods and services from us. In 2022 the St. Louis Fed estimated that $1.1 trillion in Federal Reserve banknotes were held overseas. This does NOT include the vast amounts of digital currency held overseas. So foreigners have given us goods worth $1.1 trillion in exchange for banknotes alone. And they are holding them as a store of value and a means of exchange. They have yet to ask us to give them any goods or services in exchange for those banknotes.

A point that I have made several times on this very blog.

Freethink.

The last time America went through anything comparable to what we are going through today, it was coming off the Great Depression and World War II and about to head into the post-war economic boom, as represented in the graphic above.

America in the year 1945 and America in 2025 have many parallels that are worth contemplating today. Like today, that America faced a rare epic juncture in the nation’s history and even in world history. The technological and economic forces driving through the era were just as transformative as today’s, and the political stakes around the outcome were just as high. The systems that were about to scale up in the next 25 years for them were dramatically different from the systems that came before — just like the systems that are about to scale up for us.

America has been through this drill before, like exactly 80 years before, but what’s even more remarkable is that we have been through this kind of fundamental reinvention two other times in the history of the country — once around the Revolutionary War in the late 18th century and then again around the Civil War in the middle of the 19th century. The most uncanny thing about this cycle of reinvention is that each one happens almost exactly 80 years after the last.

Curtis Yarvin:

Trump always has the right reflexes. But a reflex is not a plan. It is not his job, but the job of his administration, to translate reflexes into plans. While executing with great energy and enthusiasm, the administration has had a rocky start in this translation.

A reflex without a plan is not action, but the illusion of action. Action is defined by its purpose. The only purpose of a reflex is to do the right thing. The purpose of an action is a step toward an end state. A reflex has no end or intent. An action is proactive. A reflex is reactive. An action is strategic. A reflex is tactical. And so on.

Because of the influence of libertarianism and the beauty and power of spontaneous order, not to mention the essentially mythic characteristics of their historical faith (when thinking inside a myth, we suffer from just-world fallacy by definition), the conservative tends to operate in terms of reflexes. Nature, he assumes, will provide. Perhaps there is even some relic of the old Puritan doctrine of Providence.

Don’t overthink it.

Read it.

t’s often said that there’s an audience for everything. In our very online age, previously niche pursuits seem to gain recognition at an unprecedented rate. One nineteen-year-old has amassed a following of 140,000 people by attempting to lift a large log over his head each day for almost a year; he has never succeeded. Another young man became an overnight sensation for his enthusiastic trainspotting videos; he has now gained over three million followers on TikTok, along with a modelling gig with Gucci and a Channel 4 documentary series. It is not uncommon for individuals to become well-known for unusual things. What is uncommon, however, is when the unusual interest itself becomes popular.

Out of all the cultural pursuits one might have guessed may have a resurgence in popularity in modern times, Gregorian chanting would not have been top of my list. However, it seems that this ancient and unorthodox (get it?) musical form has now acquired a new and surprising popularity.

For those unaware, Gregorian chant is the main form of unaccompanied sacred song practiced by the Catholic Church. It is monophonic, meaning there are no chords or harmonies other than the main tune, and it is sung in either Latin or, occasionally, Greek. It developed widely throughout Western and Central Europe in the latter part of the 9th century. In the increasingly secularised Europe of today, where the population of Catholics decreased by almost half a million people in 2022 alone, why is this old, seemingly anachronistic musical tradition coming back to the forefront? And why is it cool?

Because it just is. Vexilla regis prodeunt…. I have a Pandora channel set up for Gregorian Chant, and I use it as background music because it is very relaxing. I can imagine myself in an Irish monastery with nothing to do but eat, sleep, pray, and copy manuscripts by hand. If I could retire to such a monastery, I would.

Sometimes the old ways are best.

Astral Codex Ten.

It would be facile to say that, just because technology has threatened our sense of meaning before, we shouldn’t worry when technology threatens our sense of meaning today. Some of the past apocalypses were genuinely bad. The semantic satiation of the previous forms gave us modern art and architecture, hardly known for their broad-based appeal. Do we really want Studio Ghibli anime to go the way of paintings that look like stuff?

When I contemplate these questions, I encounter a paradox. I acknowledge that my inability to marvel at a live Caruso opera in Naples has cost me something deep and beautiful. But I cannot wish that the phonograph was never invented. Does the increased variety and quantity of music compensate for the decreased profundity of each musical experience? Surely this is part of it, but I would never accept this excuse in other areas that have not yet been cheapened. A thousand moderately pleasant one-night-stands cannot equal one passionate love affair.

Maybe Progress repays us with interest for every medium it takes? Without mass-produced, mass-transmissible images, music, and bright colors, we couldn’t have Studio Ghibli. Dare we hope that, if anime becomes too cheap to appreciate, that very cheapness will open the door to new forms of art? But why should this always be true? If AI is better than all human artists, and you can run 100,000 inference copies at 10x serial speed in a data center, then why should anything be non-cheap ever again?

Read it.

In my line of work, I get asked a lot of questions. Sometimes they are on pretty heavy topics and other times they are on things that are downright bizarre. More often than not, they are driven by the news cycle. Over the last week, the one question I am suddenly getting all the time is if the United States is really preparing to go to war with Iran, and if so, why now?

This type of inquiry isn’t uncommon during times of great international tension, but this one is different. The situation seems more nebulous, and the idea that a U.S. attack on Iran could soon occur feels out of the blue for many, especially set amongst the ‘ludicrous speed’ news cycle that has been a hallmark of the first and now second Trump administrations.

Adding to people’s confusion is that there has not been one singular event to prompt the buildup to a potentially unprecedented and extremely volatile military action. This makes it harder for the public to wrap their heads around the possibility that this could really happen, and soon.

Trump, like much of the American people, is tired of Iran being the itch that nobody has the courage to scratch. He’s going to get out the hydrocortisone and take care of it once and for all.

UPDATE: Congressional Republicans Prepare 10-Bill Sanctions Package To ‘Gut’ Iran and Punish Its Supreme Leader

Read it.

In his address to Congress this month, President Trump boasted—and justly so—of his administration’s astonishing success in stopping illegal border crossings over just six weeks. “Since taking office, my administration has launched the most sweeping border and immigration crackdown in American history. And we quickly achieved the lowest numbers of illegal border crossers ever recorded.” This is no Trumpian bombast: A 94% year-on-year reduction in illegal entries really is an unprecedented accomplishment. It is also a popular one: a majority of Americans approve of controlling the border.

An even larger majority—some 76%—approve of his policy of deporting undocumented aliens who have committed felonies. Even some on the Left like Jon Stewart have been wondering: if ICE knew exactly where to find all those murderers, rapists, drug dealers, and human traffickers, as clearly they did, why then did the Biden Administration never act to deport them? Good question.

I think the question answers itself.

Okay. What rights to women not have? Give me a list.

Watch it.

Chris Williamson interviews Andrew Schutz and brings out a major difference between civilized nations and the Turd World.

Read it.

You mess with the bull, you get the horns every time.

To paraphrase Stilgar from Frank Herbert’s DUNE: It is foolish to put yourself in the way of the government fist.

The New York Times, a Voice of the Crust

[typical tear-jerker story that seems to be de rigeur for ‘journalism’ these days omitted]

The lifesaving drug regimen wasn’t thought up by the doctor, or any person. It had been spit out by an artificial intelligence model.

In labs around the world, scientists are using A.I. to search among existing medicines for treatments that work for rare diseases. Drug repurposing, as it’s called, is not new, but the use of machine learning is speeding up the process — and could expand the treatment possibilities for people with rare diseases and few options.

Thanks to versions of the technology developed by Dr. Fajgenbaum’s team at the University of Pennsylvania and elsewhere, drugs are being quickly repurposed for conditions including rare and aggressive cancers, fatal inflammatory disorders and complex neurological conditions. And often, they’re working.

The New Yorker, a Voice of the Crust.

When my daughter was ten and a half months old, she qualified as “wasted,” which unicef describes as “the most immediate, visible and life-threatening form of malnutrition.” My wife and I had been trying hard to keep her weight up, and the classification felt like a pronouncement of failure. Her birth weight had been on the lower end of the scale but nothing alarming: six pounds, two ounces. She appeared as a dot on a chart in which colored curves traced optimal growth; fifteenth percentile, we were told. She took well to breast-feeding and, within a month, had jumped to the twentieth percentile, then to the twenty-sixth. We proudly anticipated that her numbers would steadily climb. Then she fell behind again. At four months, she was in the twelfth percentile. At nine and a half, she was below the fifth.

Our pediatrician was worried. Ease off the lentils and vegetable smoothies, we were warned; we needed to get more calories into our babe. Ghee, peanut butter—we were to drench her food in these and other fats and wash them down with breast milk and formula. And that’s what we did. When we came back a month later, though, we learned that she had dropped further—and crossed into “wasted” territory.

Was this what malnutrition looked like? She seemed to be flourishing. She was happy, adventurous, and exuberantly social, babbling incessantly and forever engaging strangers with flirtatious stares. She had cheeks as plump as the juicy clementines that she loved to eat with full-fat yogurt. Although slow to hands-and-knees crawling—scooting was her preferred means of locomotion—she was hitting most of her other milestones. She was also growing longer and longer, shooting from the twelfth percentile at birth to the thirty-sixth at ten months.

My generation had a different definition of ‘wasted’.

Read it.

At this historical juncture when America is at last taking action on unlawful migration on the one hand and on the other hand credible sources such as Goldman Sachs are predicting radical worker displacement by AI and robotics it might be an opportune time to examine what labor and immigration policies really will put America, and Americans, first. A reversal of the deindustrialization processes which have beset the country over the past fifty years (and became turbo-charged once China was ushered into the WTO in 2001) if it is to be accomplished re-industrialization will look less like Rosie the Riveter and more like Robby the Robot.

There are some, with whom the Donald Trump of the shockingly gold-festooned NYC apartment might instinctively side, who call for bigger because…better, right? Matthew Yglesias argues this case in One Billion Americans: The Case for Thinking Bigger. Of course if it only required a mega-sized population to be successful 800 million people in India would not depend upon daily government food handouts and 1.3 billion Africans would not rely on food imports for 80 percent of their groceries. Even in China, 11 percent of the population (which translates to roughly 153 million people) are unable to afford a healthy diet. So before inviting another 666 million people to enjoy the blessings of US liberty, policy makers should best examine all the most likely future scenarios.

If America is not completely full, it’s certainly full of foreigners. A 2018 study by researchers from Yale and MIT utilized mathematical modelling and estimated that the number of undocumented immigrants could be around 22 million, nearly double previous estimates. Common sense and Fox News will tell you that the real total is likely closer to 30 million after the Biden border-free-for-all. Combine that with some 30 million legal foreign born residents/naturalized citizens and you get 60 million newcomers. If you accept the figures of perennial immigration critic Ann Coulter (author of the famously prophetic book Adios America) of 50 million illegals you get a staggering 80 million foreign born residents, fully 24 percent of the aggregate Census Bureau population.

“Just as not every dictatorship is totalitarian and not every thuggish ruler is Hitler, Stalin, or Mao, not every bloody war is genocidal. Political activists routinely treat hyperbole as fact in order to gain followers. Every crisis must be described as “existential.” But scholars should refrain from such rhetoric. Like Tolstoy, they should place the highest value on the truth.”

— Gary Sam Morson

Politico, a Voice of the Crust.

Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-Fla.) is still searching for a cover-up in the assassination of former President John F. Kennedy Jr. — asserting without evidence that an allegedly previously unreleased video could reveal new details of the president’s death, despite the recent declassification of reams of government files on the killing.

In an interview with Fox News on Friday, Luna said that she had just been told that NBC has a “never been seen before” video of the shooting that she would be requesting access to. The video, according to Luna, “allegedly” shows famed gunman Lee Harvey Oswald near Kennedy’s vehicle when the assassination happened.

Would that be the case, “he couldn’t have been the shooter,” Luna told Fox host Jesse Watters.

I love the smell of conspiracy in the morning.

As we all know, Oswald was in the 4th floor break room in the Texas Schoolbook Depository when the shooting took place.

Paul Graham.

What should one do? That may seem a strange question, but it’s not meaningless or unanswerable. It’s the sort of question kids ask before they learn not to ask big questions. I only came across it myself in the process of investigating something else. But once I did, I thought I should at least try to answer it.

So what should one do? One should help people, and take care of the world. Those two are obvious. But is there anything else? When I ask that, the answer that pops up is Make good new things.

I can’t prove that one should do this, any more than I can prove that one should help people or take care of the world. We’re talking about first principles here. But I can explain why this principle makes sense. The most impressive thing humans can do is to think. It may be the most impressive thing that can be done. And the best kind of thinking, or more precisely the best proof that one has thought well, is to make good new things.

Melanie Israel from The Daily Signal.

A new report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention about birth data for 2023 is out. For everyone concerned about the long-term decline in America’s birth rate, the report doesn’t show strong signs that much has changed

A cultural change brought about the ‘birth dearth’, and a cultural change will be needed to reverse it. Good luck with that, fringe magazine.

Why should we care about declining birth rates, and what’s driving the trend? As a recent Heritage Foundation report warns, U.S. fertility is now below replacement. Fewer births and our historic low fertility rate will affect the future economy. It will affect programs like Social Security. Don’t forget the military. What about caregiving as the elderly age? A declining population will affect our nation’s future in more ways than we can count.

I would argue that, with automation increasingly replacing lower level human workers with machines, we ought to welcome the fact that our population is shrinking, since that reduces the problem of a surplus of unemployed underclass people who wind up turning to crime, such as robbery and drug-dealing, to live. Social Security is a political problem–it’s basically a big Ponzi scheme–and it will require a political solution (which I don’t expect to happen until it crashes). And the military part of the automation revolution as well, and will gradually shift over being more machines and fewer people. More births is not the solution to every problem.

If you ask 10 people why the number of births keeps going down, you’ll probably get 10 different answers, from housing and child care costs to economic anxiety to student loan debt. While there’s not one sole reason (and therefore not one single policy solution,) at the heart of the issue is marriage—fewer marriages, specifically.

The link between marriage and birth-rate is not that strong. We have plenty of births outside of wedlock in the U.S. (40.5%), and we’re not even in the top ten for number of out-of-marriage births. Marriage no longer has much to do with it. (This has more to do with the agenda of The Daily Signal people to promote marriage rather than any realistic attempt to figure out what the actual cause might be.)

There are three elephants in the room that the chattering class are ignoring:

1. hormonal birth control
2. feminism
3. social media

How these inter-relate and are causing the current situation would take many books to explain, and indeed they have:

Dr. David M. Buss, The Evolution of Desire: Strategies in Human Mating
Dr. David M. Buss, Why Women Have Sex: Understanding Sexual Motivations from Adventure to Revenge (and Everything in Between)
Rollo Tomassi, The Rational Male (part of a series of five books, the sixth is in preparation)

These people need to do some honest research and look at the facts objectively rather than through the distortion field of a preconceived ideology. As Mulder liked to say, the truth is out there.

Read it.

Texas administered 15,000 more measles vaccinations this year compared to 2024—and now there’s a growing measles outbreak that has surpassed the total number of cases reported across the entire United States last year.

The news follows this website’s February report that measles cases in Gaines County, Texas, had jumped 242% following a health district campaign to hand out free measles vaccines.

A measles outbreak after higher vaccination rates in Texas calls into question the shot’s claimed effectiveness and underlying design.

I used to get a flu shot every year until I realized that the only times I got the flu was after getting the flue shot, so I quit doing that, and haven’t had the flu since.