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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

Works for me.

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First, we must remind ourselves that wealth does not happen automatically, bestowed from above as if it were manna from heaven. It has to be created through the conscious and deliberate efforts of workers, business leaders, and entrepreneurs. Notice one group of people missing from this list: policymakers. Despite their claims to the contrary, policymakers cannot create wealth. Indeed, they cannot do so. However, their role in wealth-creation cannot be understated, for they wield the simultaneous power to foster growth and to inhibit it.

Adam Smith gave us the blueprint for growth all the way back in 1776. He writes, “Little else is requisite to carry a state to the highest degree of opulence from the lowest barbarism, but peace, easy taxes, and a tolerable administration of justice; all the rest being brought about by the natural course of things.”

Comparing the United States and the EU on these dimensions reveals differences.

Babylon Bee.

News of what USAID had been spending money on has caused quite a stir online. But there’s still a lot of misinformation out there. That’s why we’ve put together this handy quiz so you can test yourself on what’s real and what isn’t.

I couldn’t.

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A second “Greater Idaho” bill was introduced in the Oregon State Legislature on Tuesday. The bill, HB 3844, would create a state taskforce to “document the state and federal legal and legislative processes that must take place to relocate the Oregon and Idaho state boundaries…” The legislature is already considering a bill in the Senate, SJM7, which is a memorial inviting the state of Idaho to begin border talks. The Idaho Legislature passed a similar memorial in 2023.

House Bill 3844, introduced by Representative Mark Owens of Crane and co-sponsored by Reps. Bobby Levy, Vikki Breese-Iverson and Emily McIntire, takes a different approach from the Senate bill. While SJM7 would begin border negotiations, the house bill would create a study group comprised of multiple stakeholders from across Oregon, who would then be tasked with attempting to answer some of the detail questions of a border change, like the impact on certain industries.

Greater Idaho Executive Director Matt McCaw praised the new legislation. “We are encouraged to see the representatives of Eastern Oregon coming together to advocate for their voters by bringing these bills to the Legislature. The people of Eastern Oregon have made clear they want to explore moving the border and joining Idaho. If the Oregon Legislature truly believes in democracy, they will honor those voters’ wishes and move forward on making a border change happen.”

Quilette.

As women’s social, occupational, and political engagement expanded in Western nations, social scientists anticipated a great psychological and behavioural convergence of men and women. As Alice Eagly and colleagues wrote, “The demise of many sex differences with increasing gender equality is a prediction of social role theory.” Their perspective is that most sex differences result from adherence to socially imposed norms and expectations. These norms and expectations have changed over the past several generations, as women entered educational, occupational, and political spheres that had been historically dominated by men. Today, in most highly developed nations, women are now the majority in higher education and are on track to become the majority in some formerly male-dominated and high-status professions, such as medicine. Even if one might argue that the gains in gender equality are not complete, social-role theory tells us that we should therefore see the sexes acting and thinking more similarly.

But like many almost-utopian academic predictions, social role and related theories have hit the wall of reality. Instead of convergence of the sexes, we have something closer to a great divergence. To the surprise and dismay of social scientists, many psychological and behavioural sex differences are larger in more gender-equal countries—precisely the opposite of their predictions—which has dealt a major blow to the plausibility of sociological theories of the origin of sex differences. As reviewed by David Schmidt and colleagues, then Marco Balducci, and most recently, Agneta Herlitz and colleagues, the divergence is broad and deep, including aspects of personality, emotional expressiveness, mental health, cognition, and occupational choices and preferences, among others. To be sure, there has been convergence in some areas (for example, intimate partner violence) and no change in others, but the trend is clear—women and men are becoming more different in important ways. Many of the expanding differences are small to moderate for individual traits, but the tableau created is of a substantive divergence.

Watch it.

Many ‘degrees’ are stuff you can actually learn on your own, and nobody is going to pay extra for your ‘degree’.

And a lot of bachelor level degrees are useful only to qualify you for some graduate program.

“I don’t want to Make a Difference. I want to Make Money.”

Read it.

Last week Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) sent Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., President Trump’s nominee for Secretary of Health and Human Services, a scathing letter accusing him of, among other things, “dangerous views on vaccine safety” and “false hysteria that vaccines cause autism.”

The letter included 175 questions that she said he should be prepared to answer at his Senate confirmation hearings.

But in her letter, she exposes her own ignorance of federal vaccine policy and the laws passed by her own legislative branch.

From a commenter on a podcast that I follow:

I was in the gym and asked my trainer, ‘What is the best machine to use to maximize my attractiveness to women?’ and without saying a word he just pointed to the ATM.

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Billionaires and Big-Tech companies are fleeing Delaware in such droves, Newsweek said the state faces an “exodus” of major corporations.

After reports over the weekend that Facebook’s Meta was considering moving its incorporation from Delaware to Texas, billionaire Bill Ackman tweeted he will move his financial management company out of the Diamond State.

“We are reincorporating our management company in Nevada for the same reason. Top law firms are recommending Nevada and Texas over Delaware,” Ackman wrote.

Read it.

Nearly 8 in 10 U.S. voters agree with President Donald Trump that requiring photo identification to vote is a reasonable measure to protect the integrity of elections, Rasmussen Reports found.

Rasmussen poll results show that 77% of likely voters say requiring photo ID is a reasonable measure to protect election integrity. That’s up from 74% in 2021.

Only 17% say photo ID is not a reasonable measure, while 7% say they’re not sure.

ZMan is having fun.

a character in the Asimov novels called The Mule. This was a character called the “destroyer of worlds” because he literally destroyed whole worlds, but he also destroyed the conception of the world. In fact, his very existence was a threat to accepted understanding of the universe, because the universally accepted conception of the universe precluded the existence of The Mule.

This has been the issue since Trump arrived on the scene. The people atop the post-Cold War world and the post-Cold War world itself, were all based on the assumption that a political character like Trump was impossible. The days of populist, nationalist and picaresque political actors was done. The present and future belonged to the Davos persons, the boys and girls who were produced by and benefitted the most from the managerial ideology that dominated the West.

What Trump’s success in 2016 represented was the nullification of the managerial order because according to the logic of managerialism, men like Trump had no place in the system, so they could never be a threat to the system. Instead, they were marginalized to the fringes of managerial life, the place where things are made, fixed, and created to keep the mechanics of the world going. They had no place in the world where decisions were made by the great and the good.

Read it.

Lets in all sorts of riff-raff.

Last week, Donald Trump signed a new executive order which attempts to end so-called “birthright citizenship” in the United States. During the signing ceremony, Trump declared that the United States is “the only country in the world that does this with birthright…”

This is untrue and the Washington Post, among other publications, was quick to declare that Trump “falsely claimed” that the US is the only country with birthright citizenship, also known as the legal principle of unrestricted—or “pure”—jus soli.

Trump would have been accurate, however, had he said that birthright citizenship is becoming rare, and that it is especially rare among those wealthier countries that experience positive net in-migration. [Letting in a lot of riff-raff]

In many countries, as generous welfare states attract growing numbers of migrants, the idea of unrestricted jus soli has become less popular.

Indeed, Europe no longer contains any states that offer birthright citizenship, and others have added new restrictions to what jus soli provisions they have.

UnHerd.

Donald Trump returned to office issuing a range of executive orders that toughened up immigration enforcement. These include using the armed forces to facilitate deportations, boosting the number of troops at the border, and reinstating the Remain in Mexico policy, which requires asylum-seekers to apply in Mexico, while blocking those who trek to the US border. To the surprise of pundits, polls suggest robust public backing for many of these measures, not least mass deportations.

One clear reason is economic: Mass low-wage migration depresses wages, especially on the lower rungs of the labour market. Progressives would do well to come to grips with this reality, even as the Trumpians would be wise neither to overstep their mandate nor to limit their policy to showy and polarising deportation actions.

To see why, it’s worth examining the history. Between 1965 and 1995, the share of Americans who favoured lower immigration rates rose to 65%, up from a third. The shift in attitudes corresponded with a dramatic rise in low-skilled legal — and especially illegal — immigration. Migrant encounters at the US-Mexico border reached 1.64 million in 2000, more than double the rate in 1980 (the 2000 peak would be surpassed under Team Biden).

ZMan:

The thing I am watching is the Musk takeover of the IT systems. The crazies are freaking out over this and maybe with good reason. The amount of collusion between the government, social media employees and the domestic terrorist doxing and stalking people is something that has never got much attention, but that could change. At least that is something the crazies fear. Then you have the billions that flow into underwriting the crazies from the government.
We now live in interesting times.

If the Soviet Union hadn’t been an existential threat, there wouldn’t be any NATO installations there.

Joel Kotkin.

intervention. Warning about how an oligarchy of “extreme wealth, power and influence” risked the basic rights of every citizen, he even suggested it could threaten American democracy itself. Given how late Biden’s intervention came, to say nothing of his typically stumbling delivery, it’s tempting to dismiss his comments as the rantings of a tired old man.

In truth, though, I think the speech matters. For in its populist appeal to Main Street over Wall Street, it reflects the revival of something we haven’t seen in years: class politics. Rather than appealing to racial subgroups, or sex or gender identity, Biden instead spoke, however fleetingly, to those many millions of Americans who care more about their paychecks than the colour of their skin.

Nor, of course, is the 46th president alone. Increasingly, both main parties realise that to win at the ballot box, they must appeal to the middle- and working classes, as proven by Trump’s roughly 10-point lead among those two-thirds of Americans without a college degree. Yet, if that speaks vividly to radical shifts across US socioeconomic makeup, it remains unclear if politicians on either side of the aisle are truly willing to back blue-collar workers — especially when the oligarchs continue to have such a grip over them all.

Quillette.

In my reading of Othello, I will demonstrate how an understanding of the cognitive mechanisms underlying male intrasexual competition can inform our analysis of character and motivation. We will see that studies in evolutionary psychology provide evidence against the argument that race is of central importance to the character of Othello. Instead, an argument will be made that Othello and Iago represent dramatic extremes of two enduring behaviours whose conflicts over millions of years have shaped much of humanity’s theory of mind and moral emotions to the present day.

Go to Amazon and search for Dr. David Buss.

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The skies over Washington D.C., where an Army Black Hawk helicopter collided with a passenger airliner Wednesday night, killing 67, is the most tightly controlled and surveilled airspace open to civilian air traffic in the United States. As such, it can be a hazardous place to be airborne, particularly at night, when bedrock principles of good airmanship can fall by the wayside and helicopter and air traffic control personnel can get overwhelmed, current and former military helicopter pilots told TWZ Thursday.

The collision killed the three soldiers aboard the UH-60 helicopter, as well as 64 aboard the PSA Airlines Bombardier CRJ700 regional jet, which was on its final approach to Ronald Reagan National Airport shortly before 9 p.m. when the accident occurred over the Potomac River.

It happened as the inbound airliner from Wichita, Kansas, made its visual approach to Reagan’s Runway 33. The PSA flight was operating as Flight 5342 for American Airlines. Go here to read our ongoing coverage of the tragedy.

Multiple investigations have been launched into the incident. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, echoing President Donald Trump, said Thursday that “there was some sort of elevation issue” with the Fort Belvoir, Virginia, based Black Hawk that the Army was investigating.

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The idea of historical inevitability has transfixed philosophers, theologians, and politicians for millennia. From the Apostles awaiting the second coming of Christ to the Marxists who looked forward to the collapse of capitalism and the dictatorship of the proletariat, the conviction that the future is already written has an intoxicating allure. In his 1945 book The Open Society and Its Enemies, the philosopher Karl Popper described this belief as “historicism” and argued that it is among the most destructive concepts humanity has ever devised.

Popper is well worth reading.

If it was grown in a lab, it isn’t meat, any more than a ‘gay marriage’ is a marriage.

Alex Tabarrok.

Antimicrobial resistance is a growing problem. Peptides, short sequences of amino acids, are nature’s first defense against bacteria. Research on antimicrobial peptides is promising but such research could be much more productive if combined with machine learning on big data. But collecting, collating and organizing big data is a public good and underprovided. Current peptide databases are small, inconsistent, incompatible with one another and they are biased against negative controls. Thus, there is scope for a million-peptide database modelled on something like Human Genome Project or ProteinDB.

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If it has a purpose, it’s not to defend against a non-existent foe, but to ensure US patronage.

ZMan rings the Passing Bell.

In certain circles the triumph of Donald Trump is being viewed as either a sign that liberalism is dying out or the sign that it is dying and the forces opposed to it are finally on the ascendant. Still others, stuck in the thinking of the last century, see the victory of Trump as a sign that the forces of darkness are ready to turn out the lights on the liberal order they are committed to defend. In both cases, there is that old problem of language in that no one seems to have the same definition of liberalism.

This confusion is not helped by the fact that for about a century the people at the retail end of politics have used the word “liberal” as a label. In the United States, people we call the left also use the term liberal. In fact, they often use the term left to mean super-liberal or radically liberal with liberal simply meaning pro-government. Liberals for example, want Medicare for all, while the left wants single payer. To confuse things even more, the right wants government regulated healthcare.

Putting aside the retail use of the word liberal, there is confusion as to what is meant by liberalism in modern discourse. The civic nationalists continue to insist it means the moral and political systems based on things like individual rights, equality before the law and the consent of the governed. Critics tend to view it as the collection of bourgeois cultural and social fads that have ripped through the West. One imagines liberalism as John Locke and the other as John Rawls.

UnHerd.

The buzzy Apple show Severance depicts a group of office drones trapped in a cubicle hell called Lumon Industries. It’s a workplace drama in which suspiciously little is revealed about the actual work done by protagonist Mark Scout (played by Adam Scott) and his colleagues. It appears to be a Sisyphean task of sorting random numbers — but we have no idea why, and neither do they. Do any of these people hunched over screens do anything of use?

Many of us have wondered the same thing about the tens of thousands of consultants and paper pushers embedded in America’s “diversity, equity, and inclusion” complex. According to data compiled by the research firm Coresignal, nearly 43,000 people were employed in DEI-related roles last year, up from 35,000 in 2022. That means America was on track to have more DEI specialists than commercial airline pilots (56,000) in the coming years.

But we know what pilots do. What exactly do DEI apparatchiks do all day in Anno Domini 2025? We may soon find out.

Read it.

“Roy’s theory goes something like this: In the age of the internet, and the global-liberal marketplace of goods, ideas, and cultural touchstones it ushered in, local cultures are subsumed into a global culture with its own lingo, assumptions, and norms. That culture may be dominated by American exports—more precisely the contributions of American tastemakers—but we are not hegemons. Young people who grow up on the Web inherit an admixture of cultural inputs with no authority capable or qualified to tell them how to make sense of it all. Culture—implicit understandings of what is and what ought to be, shared by members of a community—has globalized, commingled, and diluted to the point of disappearance. All culture, in the traditional sense, is gone.

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We’ll still need an Underclass to do the shit jobs that can’t be automated, now that Americans are too narcissistic to do such work, and traditionally that was were ‘migrants’ started out before the Welfare State made malingering so comfortable.

Read it.

China’s first Type 054B frigate, the Luohe, was commissioned into the People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) on Wednesday. The PLAN’s newest warship is purportedly bristling with advanced features. Its commissioning follows a Pentagon warning late last year about Beijing’s growing ability to quickly churn out high-end vessels as part of a rapidly expanding fleet with increasing reach across the globe. The ship class, referred to by the U.S. and NATO as the Jiangkai III class, could eventually become the backbone of China’s combat fleet in the future, although Luohe and a second Type 054B are believed to be the only two built thus far.

The Luohe was commissioned at the Qingdao Comprehensive Support Base, situated just across the Yellow Sea from South Korea. The ship was launched in 2023 and underwent sea trials last year. While Beijing released few technical details on the vessel, online posts citing the government state that the ship displaces about 5,000 tons. It is also believed to be longer and more capable of future system upgrades than its predecessor, the Type 054A.