Everyone knows that the burning of European cities is the product of two related factors: Unassimilated mass migration and three decades of economic stagnation. In other words, the destruction of Europe is the product of a set of policy choices about immigration and economics that were ratified by European voters at the ballot box. Socialism was a choice. Europe was a choice. Mass low-skilled immigration was a choice. The destructive consequences of those choices are plain. America is now confronted by a similar set of choices: —Mass migration of unskilled people who hate the West vrs. encouraging immigrants with needed skills and crafts who embrace Western liberal values. —Sectarianism and group preferences becoming more embedded in the law and institutions vrs. a legal order that promotes individualism and merit-based hiring. —More government-mandated bureaucracy vrs. using new technology to de-bureaucratize our institutions and our economy. —Embracing centralized control and redistribution vs. a market-oriented economy that puts a premium on innovation and growth. —Teaching our children that our country is generally a force for evil rather than a force for good. The consequences for Europe of fifty years of well-meaning policy choices approved of by generations of experts are plainly disastrous and probably irreversible. We still have time to choose our own fate and renew the social contract on which this country was founded. But only if we are willing to stop making excuses or blaming others and learn from what is happening in front of our eyes.

Meet Turhan Mildon: 29 years old, Turkish billionaire, and quite possibly the most efficient grifter of his generation. Most of us spend our twenties figuring out navigating roommates. He spent his collecting heads of state. Last month he married 42-year-old Alina Habba, Trump's former personal lawyer, in a reported $10 million wedding at the Waldorf Astoria. The guest list included Attorney General Todd Blanche, FBI Director Kash Patel, and White House Counsel Will Scharf. Normal crowd for a normal wedding between two normal people. How does a guy get there before 30? Easy. Follow the steps: Step 1: Marry into a Turkish family whose company built a mega-mosque for Erdogan. Get introduced by Erdogan to the president of Congo. Step 2: Become an adviser to Congo's president and pick up a Congolese diplomatic passport. As one does. Step 3: Head to Venezuela. Divorce. Get engaged to the daughter of a U.S.-sanctioned admiral close to Maduro. Land a contract running the country's state-owned cement plants. Step 4: Watch the U.S. capture Maduro in January. Learn the Trump administration reportedly weighed sanctioning you (his team calls that a "malicious rumor"). Lose the cement contract in June. Step 5: Meet Trump's former lawyer at the Kennedy Center. Plan a wedding in about 60 days. Invite the top law enforcement officials in America. Strategic? Romantic? Why not both. And the fun part: he's still trying to hang onto that Venezuelan cement deal. Totally unrelated, we're sure. Oh, and he's still only 29. Or 25, according to British corporate records. Either way, he's out-hustling everyone you know. Love is patient. Love is kind. Love apparently also comes with a diplomatic passport and a seat next to the FBI director.

Everyone knows that the burning of European cities is the product of two related factors: Unassimilated mass migration and three decades of economic stagnation. In other words, the destruction of Europe is the product of a set of policy choices about immigration and economics that were ratified by European voters at the ballot box. Socialism was a choice. Europe was a choice. Mass low-skilled immigration was a choice. The destructive consequences of those choices are plain. America is now confronted by a similar set of choices: —Mass migration of unskilled people who hate the West vrs. encouraging immigrants with needed skills and crafts who embrace Western liberal values. —Sectarianism and group preferences becoming more embedded in the law and institutions vrs. a legal order that promotes individualism and merit-based hiring. —More government-mandated bureaucracy vrs. using new technology to de-bureaucratize our institutions and our economy. —Embracing centralized control and redistribution vs. a market-oriented economy that puts a premium on innovation and growth. —Teaching our children that our country is generally a force for evil rather than a force for good. The consequences for Europe of fifty years of well-meaning policy choices approved of by generations of experts are plainly disastrous and probably irreversible. We still have time to choose our own fate and renew the social contract on which this country was founded. But only if we are willing to stop making excuses or blaming others and learn from what is happening in front of our eyes.

What you do on this app isn’t reading. It’s a kind of participatory theatre that is designed to inculcate new thought patterns through repetitive sorting and social pressure. It’s the way they train monkeys. There can be pleasures and benefits to social media activity, particularly if you are consciously trying to change the way you think, or to reinforce patterns that bring you pleasure or a sense of belonging. But it can also obviously be dangerous to your mental health. The important thing is not to delude yourself into thinking that you are reading while indulging in social media. Reading involves the encounter of your own mind with another mind through the screen of the text, not through a screen. Think there’s no difference between reading on a screen and reading a printed page of text? Here’s proof that you’re wrong: If reading on this site has become your primary way of absorbing text, then you will have trouble reading a book. It’s not that the books are getting worse. Its because you are losing the ability to tolerate the silence of the printed page which forces you back into your own thoughts. You are losing the ability to sit still and follow a more complex line of argument. You are addicted to quick dopamine hits. It’s like porn. Luckily for you, and for the higher-order functioning of your brain, we have developed a cure:

Where are our WALTER KIRN FANS!!! To our Simultaneous Sippers and Swadlers. Please give @countyhwy a 'follow' and brace yourselves for some great news.... @walterkirn returns to The Scott Adams School this coming THURSDAY!!! Marcela and I get him for the whole hour!!! @walterkirn @ZiaErica @ScottAdamsSays @MarcelaMarjean @OwenGregorian Follow & Subscribe and please re-post.

Exactly. Bill Withers was not a construct. He actually was Working Class. He was a shift worker-with the gift of being able to translate his lived experiences into hooky popular tunes. Bill Withers bent Pop towards where HE was. He made his own way .He was VERY under appreciated

My dear American friends, in my last post I gave you a snapshot of where France stands today. Now let me show you how we got here. I want you to see the whole movie before you buy the ticket. After the war, France was a machine. We called it the Trente Glorieuses, thirty glorious years. We built Concorde, the most beautiful aircraft ever made. We built a fleet of nuclear reactors in about fifteen years and gave ourselves some of the cleanest, cheapest electricity in the world. We built Ariane and put Europe in space. We built the TGV, the fastest train on earth. We invented the Minitel, an online network in millions of homes before most of you had heard of the internet. We were not a museum. We were builders. Then came 1981. François Mitterrand. Think of him as our Bernie Sanders, except he actually won. At his side, in the office next to his at the Élysée, sat a 37-year-old prodigy named Jacques Attali, his special adviser for the next ten years. The brightest minds of the left, convinced they could run an economy from a ministry. Here's what they did. They governed with Communist ministers. In 1982 they nationalized dozens of banks and the biggest industrial groups in the country: Paribas, Suez, Saint-Gobain, Thomson, Pechiney, Rhône-Poulenc. They lowered the retirement age to 60. They cut the work week to 39 hours and added a fifth week of paid vacation. They created a wealth tax. They hired massively into the public sector. Reality hit in less than two years. Capital fled, inflation ran wild, and the franc was devalued three times. In March 1983 Mitterrand had to slam on the brakes and impose austerity just to stay in the European monetary system. But here's the trick: the brakes never reversed anything. They just slowed the ratchet. The so-called right came back with Jacques Chirac, and nothing was undone. Under Chirac's presidency, France passed the 35-hour work week. Left or right, every government added one more program, one more rule, one more tax, and nobody ever took one away. At the same time, the political class did something even more destructive than bad economics. It turned the youth into a political instrument. Instead of teaching young people, including millions of children of immigrants, to love the country they lived in, it taught them a story of guilt and grievance: France as the oppressor, France as the thing to resent. You cannot integrate people into a country you've taught them to despise. We are living with the consequences of that narrative today, in our schools, our suburbs, our streets. Then forty years of slow decline, all the way to Macron. And the story has a perfect ending. In 2007, Jacques Attali chaired a commission on how to unleash French growth. Its deputy rapporteur was a young civil servant named Emmanuel Macron. The commission proposed more than 300 reforms to free the economy. Almost none were ever implemented. Even the men who built the system knew it wasn't working, and even they couldn't undo it. No balanced budget since 1974. Public spending around 57% of GDP. Debt above 3,300 billion euros. Growth stuck under 1%. Now the number that should keep you up at night. In 1995, GDP per person in France was about $27,000. In America, about $29,000. We were neck and neck. Today France is around $49,000. America is around $90,000. You are now nearly twice as rich per person as we are. What changed? Not our talent. Not our engineers. Not our schools of mathematics. The only thing that changed is that we went all in on socialism. The 35 hours, the endless regulation, the taxes that chase out anyone who builds, the belief that the state should do everything and the individual should ask permission for everything. There's a line people love to attribute to Einstein: insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. We tried. For forty years, we tried. Every government promised that one more program, one more tax, one more regulation would finally fix things. You just saw where it got us. So if you choose the Democratic Party, which is literally turning socialist in front of your eyes, you will deserve what comes next. Let me tell you exactly what will happen if you go down that road. Nobody will vote for decline. Every single measure will sound generous, compassionate, reasonable. Your builders will slowly leave or stop building. Your state will grow every year and never shrink. Your debt will compound. And in thirty years, your kids will look at a chart like the one I just described and wonder when it all went wrong. You still have something we lost. You have Elon Musk sending rockets to orbit and landing them on their tail. You have Palmer Luckey building the defense industry of the future. You have Jeff Bezos, Jensen Huang, and thousands of founders nobody has heard of yet, building in garages right now. Trust your entrepreneurs. Don't trust your politicians. I come from your future. Don't make it yours.

We no longer have ANY Blue Collar artists in R&B. We have Jazz sophisticates, Kingpin wannabes, Queen Beys, Talented Nepos, Those Ready To Rule their imaginary fiefdoms . We don’t have bus/drivers who can REALLY sing. Nobody’s looking either.

Think of the terrifying future ahead: Cholula-flavored Mayo Frank McCormick’s Redhot Spices With flavor-profiles generated by an all-powerful AI that replaces every chef on the planet. Stop this catastrophe before it’s too late!

The erasure of the specificity of African-American history and culture in favor of a generalized skin-based “brown” identity is not only toxic for African-American communities themselves, it is part of a more general assault on American history and culture as a whole. African-American speech, music and faith are foundational parts of American culture. Without those innovations there is no Faulkner or Hemingway or Fitzgerald, let alone jazz, blues, rock and roll, or the stunning work of African-American poets and writers themselves. None of these contributions have anything to do with being “brown,” and none of them are transmissible by fiat to recent immigrants from Somalia or Pakistan whose culture and historical experience is entirely different. America is a unique cultural hybrid; it is not and should not be dissolved into generalized global culture slop.

Monarch butterfly numbers climbed 64% this season, thanks in part to the growing number of people creating pollinator gardens. It’s a clear reminder of what shared purpose can accomplish. Look what we did Their recovery is still fragile, though, so continuing, and expanding those plantings next year remains essential.

Evel Knievel was the purest celebrity America has ever produced. I'll defend this proposition to the end. Even Elvis got famous for doing something others had done. Singing & dancing. Evel got famous for doing a thing only he did, something he dreamed up as a restless kid.

European immigration built a huge part of America’s human capital. With Western Europe in social disarray, America can provide a haven for millions of well-educated would-be scientists, programmers, entrepreneurs, small business owners, farmers and chefs whose dreams are being stifled. Countries compete for investment capital. But human capital is often even more important. America can benefit from German engineers, Scottish scientists, teachers and farmers, French entrepreneurs and chefs, Italian designers. Bring them all here. Let’s make America a haven for the world’s most talented people, who care about freedom. Its how this country was built.

As Europe’s cities burn, and its economy becomes sclerotic, the US should be actively encouraging the immigration of high-end human capital from Europe. Scientists, small businesspeople, programmers, biotech researchers, and farmers should all be welcome. America benefitted hugely from waves of highly-skilled European talent that came here following the failed European revolutions of 1848, late 19th century Czarist repression and upheavals, and before and after WW2. European immigrants helped build our oil and steel industries, our universities, Hollywood, and the atomic bomb. Its time to offer a new generation of skilled refugees a home.