Project 2025 Completion Tracker
I’m not certain, but I think this site was created by Trump opponents. To their credit, though, it is simply presenting without comment “nearly 300 measurable objectives from the Project 2025 document” and whether they’ve been implemented. Neat way to keep track whatever side you’re on. ◆
You may have a seen a bunch of weird tweets from me lately.
This is because I’ve been trying to implement a POSSE (Publish on Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere) system on my blog, as I’ve mentioned before.
The basic idea is that you post once to your blog, which you own, and which no one can take away or censor, and then from there the content is automatically also posted to other places where one might have followers, like Twitter, Mastodon, etc. You can also then point readers of your blog back to those outside platforms for conversation in lieu of a comments section. …
Joan Didion, John Gregory Dunne, and Quintana Roo Dunne, Hollywood, 1968. ◆
Here's a new executive order signed yesterday that launches a sweeping deregulatory push
This is what I mean by radical change.
The order creates a systematic process to review every federal regulation—not just for benefit-cost analysis, but for constitutionality, statutory compliance, proper delegated authority, and more. This is (hopefully) the “deconstruction of the administrative state” that every Republican president (including Trump I) promised but failed to deliver.
And yet, I have seen almost nothing about this in the media. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I can’t find anything about it in the NYT or WSJ—or really anywhere else. Just a lone Politico article. The truly radical stuff continues to fly under the radar. ◆
A great directory of personal websites. Hundreds of them.
Great source of inspiration. You can add your own via a simple pull request. Everyone should have their own site. ◆
On a recent episode of his podcast, Jonah Goldberg asks Bret Stephens why J.D. Vance is lecturing Europeans about democracy when he has previously criticized neocons for doing that kind of thing.
Goldberg says, “He hectors them about how Romania canceled some regional elections where some fascists did well or something like that.”
Stephens corrects him, saying, “It was the presidential election, but there was almost certainly outside interference.”
I’ve seen a lot of that over the past few days.
Lest I fall for misinformation—as it seems Goldberg did—I looked into it myself, and the bottom line is that it’s incredibly murky.
It does appear that there was a coordinated influencer campaign on TikTok in support of Călin Georgescu, but the claim that it was Russian interference rests solely on the Romanian intelligence services’ assertion that it mirrors Russian tactics.
There are also reports suggesting that the campaign was actually orchestrated by the center-right liberal party, which paid to amplify a particular hashtag. Supporters of Georgescu then hijacked that hashtag by using it themselves, thereby reaping the outsized views.
Who the hell knows?
The point is, I’m surprised at how otherwise careful pundits feel free to parrot EU talking points. The lesson: always triangulate, my friends. ◆
Can Radical Change Cure a Declining Nation?
Countries, indeed empires, grow old and decline because they become sick with demosclerosis.
Demosclerosis is the accretion of laws and rules over time, and the accumulation of interest groups who benefit from and lobby for keeping existing subsidies and protections and adding more. As more groups secure benefits, it becomes increasingly difficult to reform policies or cut spending, leading to gridlock, inefficiency, stagnation, and eventually paralysis. …
Lee Friedlander, Memphis, 2003. ◆
Gary Taubes on choosing diet over GLP-1 drugs like Ozempic
He seems a little defensive on this piece, but I agree with him in part. He argues that a keto diet like he advocates will tend to have the same results as these drugs for weight loss, but then he also says that while GLP-1 drugs may help with chronic diseases, we don’t know that a keto diet wouldn’t make you even more healthy.
At home we call this the Elon vs. RFK Jr. debate. Elon famously tweeted, “Nothing would do more to improve the health, lifespan and quality of life for Americans than making GLP inhibitors super low cost to the public. Nothing else is even close.” RFK by contrast has said that "If we just gave good food, three meals a day, to every man, woman and child in our country, we could solve the obesity and diabetes epidemic overnight [without drugs].” In my view they’re both right.
As I understand it from friends who’ve taken them, these drugs work for weight loss because they suppress your hunger and cravings for food. So you eat fewer calories. Taubes will hate me saying it, but that’s also why a keto diet works. If you don’t have the facility to eat fewer calories than you expend, whether through a keto diet or just a well-regulated balanced diet, then a drug will certainly bail you out—and that will be a great thing for millions. But this has two big caveats.
First, if you eat fewer calories because, thanks to the drug, you’re less hungry, but the calories you do eat are donuts and pizza, then I imagine you’ll still get diabetes and heart diseases and other chronic diseases. I really hope people on these drugs realize that if they want to be healthy and not just thin then diet, exercise, and sleep still matter. What I would hate to see, but what would be so American, is a pill that just lets us avoid the most obvious aesthetic consequences of shitty diet and exercise.
Second, and related, is that if everyone is on Ozempic, then there goes a big reason to clean up our horrendous food system. And our food is screwed up in part because of government interventions in the incentives in food markets. Government subsidized corn and sugar make us obese because they’re so cheap they’re in everything, but not to worry because government subsidized drugs will make you thin. ◆
I'm experimenting with adding X interactions on my blog and this is a test to that end. Please ignore this, or you can say hello. ◆
N.S. Lyons:
For China, the newfound unity of this bloc, and its persistent economic and military dominance, is the greatest of all possible problems. It could be a decade or more (if ever) before China and the shabby band of developing countries that could be called its own bloc of pseudo-allies (currently representing at most maybe around 25% of global GDP) can close the economic gap. That really only leaves China with one option in the near term: to somehow split the developed countries of The Sixty Percent, convincing a sizeable part to either join Team China or at least abandon Washington and commit to neutrality. And that means that -- to the certain exasperation of all those young Asianists and others who thought we must surely by now be past such anachronisms -- the future of the geopolitical balance now once again fundamentally hinges on Europe.
Given recent developments re Ukraine and J.D. Vance’s speech at Munich, I finally read this 18,000-word beast from 2022. It’s interesting to see what assumptions he made back then about inexorable global homogenization and how they’ve fared despite the best efforts of elites. ◆
In search of a self-sovereign indieweb
I’ve been building this little log section of my website over the last few days because I wanted a place to post links, short notes, quotidian pictures, and the like—but I want it to be a place that I own. The ethos of the IndieWeb and Micro.blog are very attractive to me, and I’m increasingly allergic to the algorithmic grinder of Twitter, Instagram, and similar platforms. As a result, I’ve gone down a deep rabbit hole researching possible designs.
I thought about using Micro.blog itself, but I don’t see how I actually own anything if I’m hosted there. I’d be subject to their community guidelines, which literally have a pride flag emoji in them. A straightforward reading of the guidelines leads me to conclude that if I were to assert that there are only two sexes, I’d be liable to get booted from the service. And that’s just an obvious example—there are any number of common-sense statements I could make that would violate progressive sensibilities and thus the guidelines. Not that I want to spend my days offending progressives, but like many other Americans, I’m pretty much done with having a self-censor on my shoulder second-guessing my every utterance. …
She's in fashion. ◆
The Intimate World and the Remote World
Arnold Kling:
On our little screens, celebrities act like our friends, and our friends act like celebrities.
I certainly can see the number and intensity of my parasocial relationships rise while real ones contract. This ends in the a VR/AI matrix of pseudoreality tuned just for us. ◆
to my seven subscribers | natalie, without restraint.
to my seven subscribers, i pledge to never be exciting. i pledge to be a reflection of your own humanity. i pledge to be full of faults and make lots of mistakes. thank you for seeing me.
I really dig this attitude to putting stuff online. ◆
The Untold Story of a Crypto Crimefighter’s Descent Into Nigerian Prison
In early Bitcoin days I met Gambaryan a couple of times and found him to be a great guy, so I kept a worried eye on the news during his jailing in Nigeria. He’s now told his story to Andy Greenberg. Incredible ordeal. And an indictment of the Biden White House and the Blinken State Department. Glad he’s safe. ◆
Incredible photographic collection of 'old' modern homes. From all around the world, but a great deal from Japan. ◆
This is the first entry in a log I’ve created for this site—a space to record what I’m doing, reading, and thinking. It’s primarily for myself, but I’m also sharing it with the world in the hope that others might find it interesting, helpful, or even spark a conversation. ◆