For decades now liberal Americans have forced themselves to conform to the cult of mandatory niceness, and all those bottled-up feelings of rage and hatred and nastiness have to go somewhere. So they glorify murderers and rapists when they think they can justify it to themselves,

Prose reveals the character of the writer, to such an extent that it's almost embarrassing to think about. When you write about something you really care about, you're basically walking around in public with your clothes off.

Free trade was as essential to US global hegemony as it was to British global hegemony in its day. Tariffs are thus a clear sign that Trump and the people backing him want out of the empire business; they’re not looking to make more vassals, but to cut loose the ones we have

April 2025 Open Post ift.tt/U3WPt4v

Pisces is a water sign, so it highlights the emotional life; its highest ideals are compassion and service, and so Piscean religions tend to focus on compassion, service, and unconditional love. The previous age of Aries was ruled by a fire sign, and its highest ideals are

France was able to build and maintain its nuclear industry because it was paying fantastically sub-market prices for uranium. Until the recent change of government in its West African quasi-colonies, France was getting uranium — which costs upwards of 200 Euros a kilo — for

Hoover was the archetypal milquetoast conservative. His response to the Great Depression was exactly the same as Barack Obama’s response to the 2008 crisis — throw lots of money at the big banks and try to convince everyone that things really weren’t as bad as they actually are.

People have flooded their brains for decades with media schlock in which the Good People are always an embattled minority fighting for the Right Things against overwhelming odds. If everyone else thinks they’re idiots, why, that just proves how right they are, and a miracle will

Glastonbury in particular has an energy I find immensely appealing and pleasant; I could easily see myself living there, or anywhere in the county or two around it. I haven’t gotten that same reaction in Wales or Scotland. It was something I had in mind once it became clear that

I’ve been predicting for more than a decade that the west coast of the US will be the Rust Belt of the 21st century, though my money’s on SF rather than LA for the Detroit-equivalent. Once the global economy comes apart and the west coast ports no longer have the economic

The US dollar is in the process of losing its status as global reserve currency, and yes, that means that the US will have to get by without all those billions of dollars a year of unearned wealth we got by selling dollar-denominated debt to central banks around the world. That’s

Frugal Friday ift.tt/IaM0sFb

Old Technologies: Sleep Learning ift.tt/zk8S0tm

Trump has set a ghastly trap for his opponents and they’re falling face first into it. He’s learned that whatever he does, they’ll oppose it, and so he’s using this to back them into defending more and more obviously criminal behavior. If things go the way they’re going, a year

The Flem-Aths’ argument sets out to find ways to argue around to the possibility that Antarctica might have been Atlantis, and neglects to notice that exactly the same argument could be used to locate Atlantis on Greenland, or Australia, or Hawai’i, or just about any place short

Magic Monday ift.tt/PaERYJ3

When a powerful cultural myth contradicts the facts, the facts are in for a bruising. That’s especially true when, as in the myth of progress, a lot of people have anchored their entire sense of identity and their hopes for the future to the myth. The more obvious it becomes