ZMan watches the turns.

This is the time of year when entertainers, politicians and famous rich people are asked to deliver commencement speeches. Inevitably they deliver tirades against normal people and in favor of the latest trends. This season, the popular chant with this sort is the “rule of law” which is ironic given that the people chanting it spent the last decade obliterating the concept. The question that is rarely asked is why is it that rich people are so eager to support this stuff?

It is not just the ditzy actors who are prone to this. A part of getting rich in America is adopting the politics of the rich, which is hostile to normal things. Rich people, until very recently, were solidly behind open borders. They backed the street violence and chaos of the last decade through donations to the thicket of not-for-profits. The billionaires underwrote the entertainment content that preached the bizarre social theories at the root of their deranged politics.

On the surface, it makes little sense. If you are a rich person, you should not want to undermine order, as it is the rules that make you rich. You got your wealth because of the system, so the system is your friend. Think a little further, however, and you can see why the rich might want to make the rules more opaque. It is a form of pulling up the drawbridge behind them so new schemers cannot get in on the action. They got theirs, so it is time to keep you from getting yours.

Read it.

The Washington Poop was once one of the most read and profitable newspaper in the country.

Gee, I wonder what happened?

Read it.

A growing number of Democrats are arguing that members of their party need to reconsider their use of certain left-wing words and phrases if they want to better connect with voters they lost in the 2024 election cycle, The Washington Post reported on Tuesday.

Some members of the Democratic Party are raising concerns that many of their candidates have become too reliant on using elite-sounding phrases, which they claim is a type of language that could isolate working-class voters, according to The Washington Post. The article cites examples of left-wing words and phrases often used by Democrats, such as “oligarchs,” “equity,” “justice-involved populations,” and “intersectionality.”

“Some words are just too Ivy League-tested terms,” Democrat Arizona Sen. Ruben Gallego told The Washington Post. “I’m going to piss some people off by saying this, but ‘social equity’—why do we say that? Why don’t we say, ‘We want you to have an even chance’?”

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As they do.

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Democratic Party strategists are hoping to win back young men through a new $20 million effort called “Speaking With American Men.”

What’s being labeled a “Strategic Plan” is an attempt to “study the syntax, language, and content that gains attention and virality in these [online] spaces.”

The plan recommends buying advertisements in video games and cautions Democrats to “shift from a moralizing tone.” The plan raised some eyebrows after excerpts of it were published by The New York Times, not least because the Democratic National Committee recently announced it might be holding another election in June that could result in the ouster of the youngest male member of the leadership team.

David Hogg was elected one of the DNC’s four vice chairs, but faced blowback after he refused to sign a neutrality policy that asked members to avoid activity that would “call into question their impartiality and evenhandedness,” instituted by DNC Chair Ken Martin. Instead, he said he would work to unseat some Democrat incumbent legislators.

“People say they want change in the Democratic Party; but really, they want change so long as it doesn’t potentially endanger their position of power,” Hogg told The New York Times after announcing his intention to seek primary challengers for some Democrat incumbents.

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The brazen anti-Americanism replete within The New York Times has become so in-your-face you can smell it like someone with a halitosis condition yawning within a few centimeters of your nose at a bus stop. How the trash newspaper tried to give new meaning to the idea of Memorial Day in its print edition is no exception.

The May 26 print edition of The Times featured no mention of Memorial Day or the numerous U.S. service men and women who died in the armed forces at all on its front page. In fact, one of the top so-called stories it chose to feature instead was teaming with anti-police, race-hustling agitprop: “Rise in Killings By Police Dims Floyd’s Legacy.”

Newsbusters.

No, Obamacare forced people to buy coverage that they didn’t want or need (like abortion coverage for nuns) because that was what the Wokerati decided they ought to have. The Tea Party opposed it becuase Obama lied, early and often.

Newsbusters.

Paula Kerger, chief executive of the taxpayer-subsidized Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), recently told the New York Times, “In terms of the news, we work really hard to try to bring multiple viewpoints forward.”

But as the second Trump administration begins and PBS comes under unprecedented existential pressure from the administration for its liberally biased evening news product, a review of coverage of the first four months of Trump II proves the PBS News Hour still occupies a liberal bubble, and it’s sealed tight as ever.

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As Americans began to prepare for Memorial Day weekend, the Supreme Court quietly handed President Donald Trump a significant victory in the fight to rein in the rogue D.C. bureaucracy.

In a short, two-page order, the court stayed a district court order that directed Trump to reinstate two federal officials whom he had fired.

Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett voted for the stay. Justices Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor, and Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented.

The obvious effect is that the two officials—Gwynne Wilcox and Cathy Harris, whom Trump removed from the National Labor Relations Board and the Merit Systems Protection Board, respectively—cannot retake their positions in either agency unless they win their lawsuits.

The implications, however, are far more sweeping.

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South African EFF leader Julius Malema ended yet another speech on Saturday by calling for more genocide against white South Africans.

Malema once again broke into the exact same song/chant that President Trump confronted the South African President with footage of last week.

“Shoot to kill, Nyamazana!” Malema chanted, adding “Kill the Boer, the farmer!”

Julius Malema’s signature song is titled “Bring Me My Machine Gun“.

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A few weeks after his message about “86”ing President Donald Trump, former FBI Director James Comey once again revealed the Left’s nefarious strategy to silence its opponents by referring to the Republican Party as “white supremacist adjacent.”

It’s not enough for the Left to cry “racism” against the GOP. No, the Left has launched a systematic approach to compare conservatives to the Ku Klux Klan and suggest they represent a terrorist threat—and Comey is breathing oxygen into that preposterous and dangerous narrative.

MSNBC host Jen Psaki asked Comey about fighting domestic terrorism, then turned to discuss the Trump administration “testing the system.” She asked if the former FBI director thinks “there are laws that should be put in place that would help better manage” various threats.

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An elite public high school in northern Virginia handed over its world-class STEM curriculum to Chinese Communist Party apparatchiks at the same time the groups donated $3.6 million to the school’s affiliated charity. That charity should be stripped of its tax privileges and forced to pay a hefty price to the IRS for facilitating the information exchange, a watchdog organization charged in a complaint filed Tuesday.

Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology was consistently ranked the nation’s top public high school when it provided its academic blueprints to a trio of CCP-linked organizations, which used the documents to launch at least 20 copy-cat “Thomas Schools” that operate today in China. From 2014 through 2021, those same China-affiliated organizations transferred $3.6 million to the Thomas Jefferson Partnership Fund, the school’s affiliate charity which operates out of its Fairfax County building. The Partnership Fund described the payments as charitable contributions in its reports to the IRS in what the watchdog group Defending Education alleges is a clear violation of federal tax law.

In its IRS complaint, Defending Education alleged the payments the Partnership Fund received from the CCP-linked groups were hardly charitable contributions, but rather payments in return for Thomas Jefferson High School’s academic blueprints. But the selling of an elite American high school’s playbook to organizations associated with a foreign adversary is “completely unrelated” to any valid charitable purpose listed in the federal tax code, Defending Education stated in the complaint.

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A visiting fellow at the Heritage Foundation praised the U.S. Department of Education’s decision to revoke waivers from California and Oregon universities which allowed them to use federal education funds to assist illegal immigrant college students.

The purpose of the Performance Partnership Pilots for Disconnected Youth program is to help students with disabilities and low-income students obtain a college education. However, the Biden administration allowed universities in California and Oregon to divert the funds to illegal immigrants, according to a department news release. Under the previous administration, TRIO programs could extend benefits to “illegal aliens.”

The waives have since been revoked, drawing praise from Adam Kissel, a visiting fellow at the Heritage Foundation and former deputy assistant for higher education programs in the first Trump administration.

Read it.

The distinguishing characteristic of ‘Democrats’ is that they seem to hatet actual democracy.

Axios, a Voice of the Crust.

Here are five steps Trump’s taking to try to keep Republican control of the House, where the GOP has an eight-seat majority — including vacancies created this year by the deaths of three Democrats.

NBC News, a Voice of the Crust.

The Magic Negro loses his mojo.

Vox, a Voice of the Crust.

It’s been more than six months, but Democrats are still picking over the cold, dead body of the 2024 election. The latest autopsy comes courtesy of Catalist, a Democratic data firm with a widely coveted voter database.

By now, you may feel that you know more about how Democrats lost last year than you ever wished to know. Which would be understandable. But Catalist’s findings are especially authoritative, as the firm tracks the actual voting behavior of 256 million Americans across all 50 states and the District of Columbia. In other words, they are not relying purely on surveys of how people said they would vote, but also hard data showing which party individual voters registered with, and which elections they did and did not show up for.

Previously, David Shor of Blue Rose Research released a 2024 analysis that drew partly on similar data sources. But Catalist boasts the longest-running voter database of any institution besides the Democratic and Republican Parties, as it has tracked the electorate’s behavior for over 15 years. Many, therefore, consider its characterizations of shifts in voting patterns to be uniquely trustworthy.

I found the results very entertaining. You can believe in its accuracy as much or as little as you care to, but at the very least it represents what Democrats are willing to admit.

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Thousands are reported to have taken to the streets in Ghent over the weekend at demonstrations in which Gaza activists repeatedly chanted “Viva viva intifada”—that is, praising violent attacks against Israel. City Liberal Mayor Mathias De Clercq is understood to have taken part in the protest, prompting anger from the local Jewish population.

Belgian campaign group Stop Antisemitism complained that “we have the feeling that the politicians do not care about our situation.”

It added that Jewish residents are so fearful of activist activities that even the most devout “do not dare to walk around with their kippah,” while others are considering leaving the city altogether.

Read it.

Germans have had enough of one bad government after another, and most are now looking to escape—not just from Germany, but from the entire EU.

According to a new YouGov poll published a few days ago, 31% of Germans would “definitely” emigrate if work, financial, or personal factors didn’t stand in their way. Another 27% said they would likely or very likely leave as well, while only 37% said they would likely or definitely stay in Germany even if given the chance to relocate.

Among the reasons for this growing dissatisfaction, the highest ranking are migration (61%) and the cost of living (41%). Over a third of respondents also said the idea of emigration has crossed their minds more often in recent months.

E.g.: Germany Still Paying NGOs To Ferry Migrants to Europe

Read it.

More than 100 schools across Germany received bomb threats in the form of emails send on Sunday, May 25th. In at least one case, the anonymous senders made reference to the Islamic State. Lessons on Monday were disrupted and in some schools exams had to be cancelled or delayed.

In Thuringia in Eastern Germany alone 35 different schools were threatened, and in Saxony 25 institutions received emails threatening to blow up the schools.

German police say they are taking the threats seriously, although the risk of actual harm was assessed as low. Police conducted searches at some of the affected schools, looking for explosive devices, but have not found any as of this morning. No schools had to be closed down.

The Antiplanner.

Oregon housing prices are “soaring.” Homelessness is increasing. Not having anything else to do, homeless people turn to drugs, aided by city and county programs giving them free syringes and other paraphernalia.

This leads to conflicts as people who actually have homes find their neighborhoods invaded by homeless people and their tents (given to them by the county government), drug dealers, and associated problems. This has Progressives looking around for someone to blame for all this other than themselves.

The latest scapegoat is the Oregon bottle bill. Passed in 1971 to help control litter, the bottle bill requires a 10 cent deposit on all beverage cans or bottles. As a result, up to 80 percent of Oregon cans and bottles are returned for recycling, as opposed to around a third in states with no bottle bills. Environmentalists and libertarians both support the bottle bill as an incentive-based solution to the problem of littering and pollution.

Yet now the bottle bill is come under attack for “dragging down Portland” because homeless people pick up discarded bottles and take them to redemption centers, which then become centers for drug trafficking. This has led the legislature to amend the bottle bill to make it more difficult to return bottles for a refund.

Read it.

In Los Angeles County, spring is in the air and so are higher taxes. Beyond the usual punishing ritual of April 15, county residents also now face some of the highest sales taxes in the country.

Sales taxes in the area have shot up from 9.75% to as high as 11.25% to fund still more services for the ‘homeless’. The permanent sales tax increase is supposed to raise $1 billion a year to replace the stolen billions spent by the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority.

Families will pay even more for food so that LA’s politicians and nonprofits can steal even more.

Read it.

An article in CleanTechnica by Michael Barnard, “Climeworks DAC & Fiscal Collapse & The Brutal Reality Of Pulling Carbon From The Sky“, documents the failure of another anti-CO2 program.

The Foundry.

President Donald Trump signed an executive order to end birthright citizenship on his first day back in office in January. Since then, 22 states have sued to block it, sparking debates over whether the Constitution grants citizenship to anyone born on U.S. soil.

“Many people today take it for granted that the answer is ‘yes’: If you’re born on American soil, you’re an American citizen. Period. End of issue. But is that what the Constitution says?” asked Amy Swearer, a senior legal fellow at The Heritage Foundation, in a recent Prager University video examining the legal issues behind birthright citizenship.

While the 14th Amendment says, “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States,” Swearer said that this raises the question, who is born subject to U.S. jurisdiction?

Whatever it means, if they intended to give people born in the U.S. unconditional citizenship, they wouldn’t have included that qualifying clause. So the Woke Narrative is a lie.

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An Amazon employee who coordinated closely with USAID, a Bloomberg engineer, a professor at Northwestern University, and an armada of tech bros donated large sums to the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL)—a militant marxist political party in the United States in the news over its ties to Washington, D.C., shooter Elias Rodriguez.

The PSL confirmed Rodriguez’s affiliation with the organization in an X post, claiming the terrorist only had a “brief association” with the group.

During the 2024 presidential election, the party raised about $387,000 for its presidential candidate Claudia De La Cruz, according to federal election records. While the vast majority came from small-dollar donors, a select few Americans dug deep to support the PSL’s standard-bearer.

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A Northwestern University professor—hired as part of a deal with anti-Israel groups to end last year’s encampment—sits on the boards of two organizations that were founded by and frequently partner with Palestinian terrorists, a Washington Free Beacon review found.

Last year, Northwestern president Michael Schill struck a deal with radical student groups, including Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), to end their encampment, agreeing to recruit two Palestinian professors and provide full rides to five students from Gaza.

Northwestern tapped Mkhaimar Abusada last fall as a visiting associate professor of political science to fill the first of those faculty slots, teaching a weekly undergraduate course on the “Palestinian National Movement.”

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A little while back, the progressive, man-hating feminist movement produced what they surely thought was a “gotcha” condemnation for men—it was a social media trend where women would announce whether they’d rather be alone in the woods with a man or a bear…with a vast majority of women settling on the bear, highlighting “the fear of male violence.” (Never mind that many of these women were completely untouchable, as if the average man would ever desire to assault them, even given the license in a desolate forest.)

Since progressive feminists are the dimmest of society’s bulbs, I can only assume this “man or bear” dilemma was a calculated campaign to manipulate the useful idiots—similar to Lawrence Lader and Bernard Nathanson when they convinced Betty Friedan to include abortion in her ideals (which she originally rejected). The progressive feminist movement that began then was not an organic occurrence, but an orchestrated scheme, directed by…men, which is what I’d call peak irony.

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Germany has deployed a permanent military brigade beyond its borders for the first time since the end of World War II, with troops dispatched to the capital of Lithuania. The event was inaugurated by German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, who said during a military ceremony in Vilnius that “the security of our Baltic allies is also our security.”

The decision is part of a series of actions in recent months by European nations to “bolster defenses” on NATO’s eastern flank amid claims that Russia intends to invade greater Europe if they defeat Ukraine. The “domino theory” remains unfounded and the Kremlin has never threatened to attack any country outside of Ukraine. The move to shift troops to Lithuania places them near the border of Belarus (a Russian ally) and within striking distance of Ukraine or the Russian border.

European governments have been threatening an escalation by eventually moving NATO troops into Ukraine in direct confrontation with Russian forces. Vladimir Putin has previously warned that NATO troops in Ukraine represent a red line which could result in nuclear conflict.

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When truth hits Narrative, truth always loses.

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In May 2013, John Rogers, a longtime Federal Reserve economist, was in Shanghai for an academic forum when he received an email that would eventually alter the course of his life and career.

The message was from someone claiming to be a Chinese graduate student. Rogers says he declined an offer of payment but kept in touch, later accepting an all-expenses-paid invitation to return to China. That visit, U.S. prosecutors allege, marked the beginning of a yearslong effort by Chinese intelligence to extract sensitive information from inside one of the most important economic institutions in the United States.

Victor Davis Hanson.

Nothing highlights the poverty of the media-Democratic mind than its weary use of echo-chamber buzzwords.

Once Pravda-like instructions are sent out from DNC operatives, mindless media anchors mouth them in lockstep as gospel.

So, it was with the supposed “ambush” when South African President Cyril Ramaphosa met Donald Trump. Trump indeed pressed his guest on a number of issues, from the decades-long targeted killing of white agriculturalists on their farms by black hit teams that have totaled somewhere between 1,500 and 3,500, depending on how one defines such targeted killings.

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

The Times (UK).

There is good news for your future palate. It turns out that insect burgers may not be on the menu after all.

And, assuming we are still consuming at least some meat in our climate conscious future, it seems unlikely that our livestock will be eating them either.

A study commissioned by the Department for Environment Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) has found that insect protein is generally worse for the environment than less outré non-meat protein alternatives — such as soy.

Read it.

In the race to an all-optical AI data center, a major player has now placed a bet on a different horse. Semiconductor manufacturing giant TSMC announced that it will work with Sunnyvale startup Avicena to produce microLED-based interconnects. The technology is a pragmatic twist on replacing electrical connections with optical ones to meet the high needs of communication among an increasing number of GPUs in a low cost, energy efficient way.

Thanks to the computational demands of large language models and their cousins, AI clusters are facing unprecedented requirements regarding amounts of data, bandwidth, latency, and speed. Sooner or later, the copper wires that connect processors and memory within a single AI data center rack will have to be replaced with optics. “There’s a huge push to get optical connections as close to the board as possible,” says Lucas Tsai, a vice president at TSMC.

Avicena offers a unique approach, using hundreds of blue microLEDs connected through imaging-type fibers to move data. The company’s modular LightBundle platform avoids problems with lasers and their associated complexity that threaten the reliability, cost, and power consumption of other optical chiplets. Tsai says “it’s very unorthodox!” But it is ideal for these short distance applications, and that’s precisely what makes it interesting.

Jasmine Crockett: ‘It’s Time for Republicans to Question Trump’s Mental Acuity’ (Peter Wade/Rolling Stone)

Mike Johnson Insists It’s ‘Moral’ to Throw People Off Medicaid (Peter Wade/Rolling Stone)

What Democrats Can Learn From Bruce Springsteen (Brian Hiatt/Rolling Stone)

For Trump, Civil Rights Protections Should Help White Men (Erica L. Green/New York Times)  They should help everybody.

The pool’s open. Trump’s laid off the team that helps protect swimmers. (Sophie Gardner/Politico)  Because, as we all know, protecting swimmers it TOTALLY the responsibility of the Federal government – and the Federal taxpayer.

Trump’s Vision: One World, Three Powers? (Edward Wong/New York Times)  Maybe he just wants America to be great again.

Painter Jean: Casey Means, our next Wiccan Surgeon General  And the lies just keep on comin’.

Sunset Park after-school program upended by Trump’s AmeriCorps cuts (The Gothamist) Because, as we all know, after-school programs are TOTALLY the responsibility of the Federal government – and the Federal taxpayer.

How to Hide a Constitutional Crisis (The Atlantic)

Donald Trump’s Politics of Plunder (Evan Osnos/New Yorker)  Worse than ‘Ten Percent for the Big Guy”?

What Pete Hegseth Gets Wrong About ‘Warfighting’ (Thomas E. Ricks/Politico)

Members Only: A New Trump Club, Ned’s Club and the Enduring Old Guard (Elisabeth Bumiller/New York Times)  Feminists hate it where there’s any place they can’t go, be it men’s clubs or men’s bathrooms.

Read it.

Some of us knew it all along. No surprises here.

Read it.

Democrats actively oppose the Trump administration’s efforts to arrest and deport illegal immigrants, despite the administration’s focus on those with criminal histories.

To support their opposition, Democrats frequently claim, almost as an article of faith, that illegal immigrants are less prone to commit crime. “The crime rate among immigrants is far lower than the crime rate among native-born Americans,” New York Rep. Jerrold Nadler asserted confidently. “So the whole issue is wrong.”

Being in this contry illegally is a crime in itself, so there is no such thing as a non-criminal illegal immigrant–some are just more criminal than others.

The Other McCain.

My two daughters are named Kennedy and Reagan, and one of my sons is named Jefferson, so I’m not against the trend of presidential names, but probably you shouldn’t name your daughter “Carter.” That was my first thought when I encountered the name Carter Sherman, who writes for the U.S. edition of the Guardian. Knowing my readership, I’m sure the commenters will engage in a spree of ad hominem remarks about Miss Sherman’s appearance, but while y’all will be slagging her looks, my concern is about the nature of her work. Mark Judge has a very interesting article about Miss Sherman and her forthcoming book, The Second Coming: Sex and the Next Generation’s Fight Over Its Future.

There’s a certain hall-of-mirrors factor involved here: When Miss Sherman was an undergraduate at Northwestern University, she and her sorority sisters were interviewed by Peggy Orenstein of the New York Times, who was working on a book about young women’s sex lives. Orenstein, then in her 50s, was focused on the theme of “hookup culture,” and Miss Sherman says she and her Northwestern sorority sisters disappointed Orenstein’s expectations: “Frankly, we weren’t slutty enough.” So now Miss Sherman has written her own book, with its own preconceived conclusion, i.e., that “sexual conservatism” is the real danger to women, and I suppose her work is about as reliable as Orenstein’s, which is to say, not reliable at all.

The newspaper business was created by men for men: “Tell us the facts. Let us know what’s going on. Don’t take all day about it; we’re busy.”  The Fox News trope says it all: “We report. You decide.” It’s all about the story. Watch the film His Girl Friday to see how that worked.

‘Journalism’, however, is a pseudo-profession that has been taken over by the female mindset: Start with a heart-warming (or tear-jerking) story that sets the emotional tone for the propaganda that follows. Every ‘journalism’ student ever says the same thing in response to the question, “Why are you in journalism school?”: “Because I want to make a difference!” It’s not about the story, it’s all about me. (And that’s why it takes forever to get to the point; we are all the stars of our own movies. The selfie is queen.) Watch the film Shattered Glass to see thie modus operandi in action – or review the history of Pulitzer Prizes awarded to (and then revoked from) ‘journalists’ who made it all up to win the prize.

For the record: Miss Sherman would have been good-looking enough for any practical purpose (i.e. finding a good husband) prior to the distortions induced by the Kardashian Age.

ZMan goes literary.

When you look at lists of the best science fiction movies, what you see is a mix of recency bias and popular nonsense. Star Wars gets placed near the top because the lists are usually targeted to people who consume corporate slop. Back to the Future is another one on these lists that does not qualify as science fiction. It is a comedy where time travel is the MacGuffin. Of course, this raises the question as to what qualifies as science fiction and what makes for good sci-fi.

Science fiction is speculative fiction that relies on science to create scenarios where questions about the human condition are more easily explored. Artificial intelligence, for example, is useful in telling stories about what it means to be human. We instinctively know a computer program is not human, even if it is able to speak with us like a real human being. That gets to the issue of what separates flesh and blood humans from the artificial versions we are creating.

Heinlein said that science fiction takes what we know now, what we thought we knew before now and then speculates about the future based on a solid understanding of how science advances. Asimov famously said that science fiction is about how humans react to changes in science and technology. Together they make for a good definition of science fiction, which is as much about the science as the fiction. In other words, it is not just drama in space or in the future.

Read it.

BLUF: Always put both the seat and the lid down on a toilet before flushing. You’ll be glad you did.

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In 1900, South Asia, East Asia, Central Asia, the Middle East and North Africa were patrilocal and patrilineal, but with one fundamental distinction. Endogamy versus exogamy. South Asians married kin, East Asians did not. This cultural difference may have mediated their responses to economic growth, in turn shaping culture.

I suggest that exogamy motivates an outward orientation for marriage, commerce and cooperation. As exogamous societies undergo economic growth and urbanisation, people seize any and all opportunities to develop ties of trust, intimacy and reciprocity.

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The lecture that launched geopolitics in the Anglosphere was given 120 years ago, on 25 January 1904, to the Royal Geographical Society in London. The speaker, Halford Mackinder (1861–1947), didn’t invent the term, but did more than anyone else to give the idea currency, not least because he was a leading commentator of the world’s most powerful empire and naval power — two elements that featured so heavily in the concept.

As director of the London School of Economics, Mackinder was a well-connected academic who was also active in politics. He had joined the Conservatives in 1903, having been one of their allied Liberal Unionists. After two unsuccessful attempts to enter Parliament in 1900 and 1909, he was to serve as MP for Glasgow Camlachie from 1910 until 1922.

During Britain’s intervention in the Russian Civil War, he was High Commissioner to (anti-Bolshevik) South Russia in 1919–20. Subsequently, he was chairman of the Imperial Shipping Committee from 1920 to 1945 and chairman of the Imperial Economic Committee between 1925 and 1931.

The contemporary influence of Mackinder’s views is a matter for discussion. Yet the nature of the British state, which then lacked administrative and intellectual institutions for imperial planning and defence, increased the possibilities for ideas from external thinkers to make an impact. The gap was filled by circles of intellectual opinion sustained through meetings in London, including in clubland. Mackinder’s metropolitan milieu was therefore very much an active part of the debate about the power Britain should rightly wield and the anxiety about its ability to do so in a changing world.

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This radical bailey position is made untenable in three ways. First, my work with Phil Magness, John Moore, and Phil Schlosser (published in Economic Journal and Economic Inquiry) suggests that Piketty was careless in his usage of historical source materials and made numerous important errors in estimating inequality pre-1960. One involved his application of a rough estimation of income, though original sources contained data that could have enabled a more precise calculation. My coauthors and I tried to refine these pre-1960 estimates. Further, Piketty’s work contained significant historical inaccuracies (such as overlooking the exemption of state and local government employees from federal taxes before 1938) and misrepresented several steps in his methodology. We addressed these errors, too. Overall, we discovered that Piketty overstated inequality levels before the 1960s by about 20 percent.

Second, our work in Economic Inquiry showed that most of the levelling in the 1930s occurred as a result of the wiping out of capital gains. Roughly four-fifths of the “golden age” of equality (between 1950 and 1980) owed to the Great Depression, not tax policy. This finding is hard to celebrate because it means that greater equality was achieved while everyone was getting poorer. It also eliminates most of the purported influence of higher tax rates in generating the “golden age” of equality.

Third, the work of Gerald Auten and David Splinter shows that the golden age was not so golden. Once they corrected for how tax policy often encouraged changes in how taxpayers organized their income sources according to corporate or personal identities, they found that inequality started from a higher floor in the 1960s than Piketty and his colleagues presume. They also find a milder increase in inequality since the 1980s.

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Once again, tractors have taken over the roads of France. On Monday, May 26th, more than 200 agricultural vehicles blocked the main arteries leading into Paris, causing significant traffic disruptions. The so-called escargot (‘snail’) operations—extremely slow protest marches—brought key routes to a halt. This is not mere congestion; it is the expression of the deep frustration that thousands of farmers feel as their way of life is being continuously threatened by green policies pushed from Paris and Brussels.

This new wave of mobilizations coincides with the review of a proposed law aimed at “lifting restrictions” on the agricultural sector, including a return to certain pesticides. However, pressure from ecologists and leftist deputies, who have submitted numerous amendments, threatens to derail the reform.

Farmers see it clearly: the political class still fails to understand or address the needs of the primary sector. Worse still, the official narrative increasingly paints them as “radicalized,” “violent,” or even as being from the “far right.” What they fail to see or rather admit is that in reality, many of these protesters are in fact disillusioned left wingers, traditionally linked to trade unions and the rural world.The rise of Coordination Rurale farming union, known for its iconic yellow hats, has broken France’s largest farm union, the FNSEA’s monopoly and has channeled the discontent of a generation that feels abandoned by the system. Its leaders, such as Serge Bousquet-Cassagne and Lionel Candelon have given a voice back to small and medium-sized producers in the face of an increasingly distant political and administrative machine.

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Sunday marks the fifth anniversary of the death of George Floyd, a 46-year-old black man who died in police custody. May 25, 2020 also marked the beginning of a violent revolution — an insurrection, if you will — led by opportunistic Marxists under the banner of Black Lives Matter bent on dismantling the last best hope of earth.

A jury would later convict former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, who is white, of Floyd’s murder. Floyd, who, according to toxicology results, had high levels of fentanyl, methamphetamine and cannabis in his system, repeatedly resisted arrest. He certainly didn’t deserve to die. But the convict with the long rap sheet became a patron saint for a leftist movement preaching chaos in an election-year power grab.

The Washington Poop, a Voice of the Crust.

Maybe it’s using the word “oligarchs” instead of rich people. Or referring to “people experiencing food insecurity” rather than Americans going hungry. Or “equity” in place of “equality,” or “justice-involved populations” instead of prisoners.

As Democrats wrestle with who to be in the era of President Donald Trump, a growing group of party members — especially centrists — is reviving the argument that Democrats need to rethink the words they use to talk with the voters whose trust they need to regain.

They contend that liberal candidates too often use language from elite, highly educated circles that suggests the speakers consider themselves smart and virtuous, while casting implied judgment on those who speak more plainly — hardly a formula for winning people over, they say.

The latest debate is, in part, also a proxy for the bigger battle over what the Democrats’ identity should be in the aftermath of November’s devastating losses — especially as the party searches for ways to reverse its overwhelming rejection by rural and White working-class voters.

“Pay attention to me or I’ll hurt myself!’
“Go ahead, knock yourself out – so to speak.”

Not the Babylon Bee.

Six months after a stinging nationwide rejection that handed Donald Trump a commanding reelection and fractured their core coalition, the Democratic Party is turning to a new solution: spending $20 million to figure out why young men don’t like them.

The project, codenamed SAM — short for “Speaking with American Men: A Strategic Plan” – is described in a prospectus obtained by the New York Times. It outlines a massive push to decode the language and culture of disaffected young men, particularly in online spaces, and includes a proposal to buy ads inside video games.

“Above all, we must shift from a moralizing tone,” the document urges.