It’s worth remembering that in nearby Romania, Calin Georgescu is currently in jail on a supposed fraud case, and is still being investigated for things like ‘spreading disinformation.’ His real crime seems to have been winning the first round of the 2024 presidential election - which was later annulled, and a candidate acceptable to the EU became president.

In its 1998 Christmas Special Edition, the Economist ran an article about the "Voluntary Human Extinction Movement." Festive. The article itself treated the movement with irony, but it's a real thing that some people want to stop reproducing and die for the "good of the earth."

The playbook will go something like this: 1) win back the House and Senate, and hopefully the Presidency in 2028; (2) admit DC and Puerto Rico as states, which doesn’t need a constitutional amendment, to gain 4 new Senate seats and cement control; (3) pack the Court, which only requires a change to the Judiciary Act of 1869, not a constitutional amendment; (4) eliminate the electoral college, which is unconstitutional, but not when you have a rigged court that finds the ‘loophole’; (5) flood the country with pliant migrants, swamp the natives, and hold power indefinitely.

It’s because of the difficulties of maintaining an American identity that President Coolidge signed the 1924 Immigration Act - which shut the borders down and facilitated assimilation - and that required 40 years and a world war to achieve. This entire discussion shows we need another ‘time out’ on immigration and forceful assimilation policies.

Someone tried a funny scam on me a few years ago. I was selling a dining room set online. Someone said he wanted it, offered what I was asking. But he was moving - needed to send a moving company to pick it up to bring it to his place down south. He sent me a check, and contacted me to make sure I got it. I didn’t recognize the bank - I brought it to my bank, and they said it looked like fraud. I called the deal off and the guy ghosted me. But imagine how many fall for this kind of thing. They get a check that bounces, and they lose their furniture - someone working with the scam artist takes it and fences it. Must happen every day in a country of 350 million. You won’t find this in a spreadsheet, and it generates the sort of weary malaise that makes people distrustful of fellow ‘community members’ and social scientist cheerleaders who always say everything is getting better.

Colleges and universities are so much more expensive because parasites called ‘administrators’ must all get paid. At the expense of students and their parents. You could fire 95% of them, return governing authority to professors who do the real work - and save everyone $$.

If social security does go bust, it’s going to be younger Gen X and Millennials who really take it on the chin - having paid in large sums over most or all of their working lives, only to get nothing.

Watching all of this immigration/H1B discourse, it’s astonishing how many foreigners feel entitled to participate in the American market at the expense of Americans, and how many recent immigrants feel entitled to call the shots. I would never feel that way about another country.

America was built by settlers - who literally built colonies out of the wilderness. They didn’t show up like ‘immigrants’ and enjoy an already functioning society with social welfare benefits. Then over time the founders allowed immigration, then shut it off as they saw fit.

Well crafted vanilla ice cream is delicious - an elegant desert. I don’t know why people make fun of it. Stuffing your ice cream with nuts, cookie dough, chunks of this or that - it’s vulgar. You’re covering bad ice cream.

I did not know that George Floyd had overdosed on fentanyl just 8 weeks before his death - that he had actually been in intensive care because of it. Years later we're still learning new facts proving Derek Chauvin and the other officers were railroaded.

‘True’ crime is only interesting for most people if you have some ‘shocking’ reveal that someone is innocent, has been ‘framed’ or whatever. The mundane reality that almost all the people arrested are guilty isn’t ’exciting.’

Woke is a just a word that people want to shake off now. It was not a movement, just a label for leftist excess at a particular time. Leftists once liked to be called ‘liberals,’ then that became toxic. They shifted to ‘progressive.’ That’s still around but maybe not forever. Really there has just been one continuous path of getting more extreme over time. There was a lot of hatred for ‘dead white men’ in the 1990s. Remember Jesse Jackson chanting ‘hey hey, ho ho, Western Civ has got to go!’ It got more extreme over time - but Jackson could have been described as ‘woke’ had that been a term then.