...the run of the mill non honors kids have gotten really bad. Very low tolerance for working hard, very short attention span, very short stamina for active listening. This is the brainrotted/fried dopamine group. Blame the screens, the social media, and the parenting for this group. It's the group that is the most worrying because a decade ago, I'd estimate that maybe 10-20% of kids at a school are like this, and now it's probably 40-50% of each graduating class.

Good: The Tiny Solar Panel That Could Change America. They've finally invented an affordable solar panel that you can just plug into an outlet. If energy can be decentralized, power can be decentralized.

Bad: A cold blob in the Atlantic may herald a change in ocean currents, "causing accelerated sea level rise on the US East Coast, plunging Europe into a winter deep freeze and shifting the monsoon in Africa, driving prolonged droughts."

Good: Japanese fans celebrating Daichi Kamada's late equalizer against Netherlands at the Shibuya crossing in Tokyo. Only 90 years ago, the Japanese were probably the worst people in the world, and now they're among the best. This gives me hope for humanity. And even if younger generations are illiterate, they're still less violent than older generations were, and illiteracy is not that bad, just ask the Middle Ages.

Forty million people on food stamps, thirty million without health insurance, the highest maternal mortality rate in the developed world, the highest incarceration rate on earth, an opioid crisis that has killed over half a million people and counting, a housing market so broken that working people cannot afford to live in the cities they work in, an education system that buries young people in debt before they earn their first dollar, infrastructure that is literally collapsing, a life expectancy that is going backwards, a political system so thoroughly purchased by concentrated wealth that the laws it produces bear almost no relationship to what the public actually wants or needs.

A comment about the soul of conservatism:

There is no "left vs right". There's every single political philosophy that believes in a moral system of governance on one side, and an amoral system on the other. The whole point of conservatism is social hierarchies. From Burke to Trump, from Tories to slavers to Nazis to the Taliban to MAGA. It's why conservatism has been on the wrong side of history, always.

We're supposed put right and left on a spectrum, but I see the right as the center of a flowering, the hard core of the freedom of the powerful to crush the weak under their boots. And around it, in all directions, is anything we come up with that works better than pure domination. Stephen Miller famously said, "We live in a world, in the real world, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power." If that were true, then every time Miller encountered someone larger and stronger than him, that person would kill him and take his stuff. What he really wants is a world where he has power and nobody else does. I saw another Reddit comment by someone who went to high school with Stephen Miller. Miller was giving a campaign speech for a student government office, and said that he shouldn't have to pick up after himself because that's the janitor's job. He was booed. Someone with that value system can get no power in high school, but can be at the top of the US government, because the US government is fully owned by that value system.

A comment about how Nazis were not ruthlessly efficient but were incompetent thugs. Farther down in the thread there's stuff about fascism and Peter Thiel.

Another comment about conservatism = hierarchy, and farther down in the thread is well reasoned stuff about how Democratic Party centrists and moderates are still conservative because they believe in financial domination.

To them, the second-greatest injustice imaginable is for those [they perceive to be] on top [of social hierarchy] to be bound by the restrictions, scrutiny, and lack of resources reserved for those on the bottom. The first greatest injustice is for those on the bottom to have access to the rights, credibility, and resources reserved for those on top.

Shifting into culture, an answer to the question Why Do So Many Fundamental Christian Cults All Like The Same Puffy Hair On Women?

By voluntarily taking on complex, expensive grooming that is not even remotely comparable to what any man in the congregation is ever called upon to do, especially with that specific erotic undercurrent, a woman with big puffy hair that is still touchably soft is performing for the entire congregation that she is "womanly". She is centering male desire. She has her husband's erotic comfort at the forefront of her mind. She is conspicuous to the other women as a woman who invests time and energy and investment into making men feel like their erotic tastes rule her life. These women are often rewarded in little ways, like being put in charge of Women's Bible Study or the nursery. She may get to organize snacks for Men's Bible Study.

Finishing with some good news: New Yorkers, what changes have you seen under Mamdani's leadership? "It is absolutely wild how fast landlords can suddenly find the money and motivation to fix decades of crumbling infrastructure the exact second the city actually starts holding them accountable."

Anthropic would have us believe that it is inventing a new category of being whose needs for protection require essentially no divergence from how a software company would treat an ordinary chatbot that lacks conscious experience. That's so convenient that it's simply not plausible.

A few months back, a reader asked me if I think AI images and videos are important. That struck me as a strange question, and when I thought about it, I decided no, they're not important, and that's good. Pretty much every use of AI that tries to be important, is harmful. In a hundred years, if AI still exists (which I doubt), there may be laws that it can only be used recreationally, for the same reason that drugs are good recreationally but not when you're using power tools.