March 14, 2025

FLORIDA MAN FRIDAY [VIP]: Did He Have to Go Full Mongo? “It’s time for your much-needed break from the serious news, and before we begin I need to assure you that no horses were harmed in the making of this week’s Florida Man Friday.”

Posted at 3:21 pm by Stephen Green 1

THE ATLANTIC:

(Salena Zito already responded beautifully to that piece earlier this week.)

ALSO THE ATLANTIC:

Maybe it would help if the Democrats knew any men.

UPDATE (FROM GLENN):

Plus:

Posted at 2:50 pm by Stephen Green 80

MUSK DERANGEMENT SYNDROME IS REAL AND IT IS STUPID: The Stupidest Example Of Musk Derangement Syndrome Yet. “Why yes, that’s the problem, you simply didn’t call people who disagree with your politics Nazis hard enough. Doubling down on that will surely make your agenda of child mutilation, trannies in women’s sports, open borders and wasting taxpayer money to secretly fund the far left super popular.”

Posted at 2:35 pm by Stephen Green 27

DOGE, THE EARLY YEARS:

Well, we know Obama wasn’t very serious about this cost-cutting effort, because Joe was allegedly in charge it. (“Don’t underestimate Joe’s ability to f*** things up,” to coin a phrase.) Note that Joe’s speech is slowing down a bit in this 2011 video, there are several edits in his portion of the clip, and he looks a little glassy-eyed, but he’s not yet the withered husk of 2020-2024.

UPDATE: Flashback: When Did DOGE Really Launch?

Obama and Biden promised taxpayers a DOGE-esque housecleaning. They conceded the point of its necessity. Eventually, voters were going to demand delivery on those promises. They whetted the appetite for an outsider to come in and clean house — and even then, it took Trump a second opportunity to make good on it.

To be fair, though, Obama and Biden weren’t the first to virtue-signal on that point. Bill Clinton and Al Gore made a big production over their study on “reinventing government,” launching what certainly looked like a DOGE-esque effort to put the recommendations into action. Like Obama, Clinton put his VP in charge of the effort, which went exactly nowhere after the press conference announcing it. It sure seems like a consensus existed for a major executive branch overhaul for decades before Mr. Musk came to Washington.

Dems were happy to go along with both Obama and Clinton, because they knew it was all kabuki — but now they’re terrified — and furious — that Trump and Musk are actually implementing a plan to shrink government.

Posted at 2:22 pm by Ed Driscoll 78

ANALYSIS: TRUE.

If you hadn’t heard it was a thing — and you probably hadn’t — Michelle Obama’s podcast is a bomb.

Posted at 1:48 pm by Stephen Green 93

WHY ARE LIBERAL WOMEN SO MISERABLE? Social psychologist Dr. Luke Conway, writing on the Rod Martin Report, surveys the data and concludes two factors — traditional marriage and religious faith and practice — are keys to understanding the answer.

Posted at 1:34 pm by Mark Tapscott 24

SCIENCE!

Manly’s BlueSky profile says she’s into “Brain Health Equity,” whatever that is.

Posted at 12:46 pm by Stephen Green 120

SUMMER RERUN SEASON STARTS EARLY THIS YEAR ON TELEVISION: ‘Mercury Poisoning Is Back:’ Colbert Freaks Out Over EPA Deregulation.

Joe Biden became president in 2021, which was not that long ago, but according to CBS’s Stephen Colbert, repealing Biden-era EPA regulations is a public health crisis of grave consequence. Colbert made the remarks on Thursday’s edition of The Late Show, where he also expressed his lack of interest in the financial cost of regulations.

Reaching for the alcohol, Colbert declared, “Trump also, and I want to be fair, is ruining everything. For instance, his EPA, his Environmental Protection Agency, announced plans to repeal dozens of the nation’s most significant environmental regulations, including more than two dozen protections against air and water pollution. I mean, just even hearing that stresses me out. I need a drink, man. There you go. Oh, my god. That’s water.”

Moving on, Colbert added, “The EPA is also going to overturn limits on soot from smokestacks and restrictions on emissions of mercury. Mercury poisoning is back, baby! Pretty soon your horoscope’s gonna read, ‘This month, Mercury is in retrograde and also in your brain. Blaaaaaaggahhhaa.’”

Colbert’s source for this was a New York Times article that included a note that the soot and mercury regulation was a Biden rule, but Colbert made it seem like Trump was turning the clock back to the 1870s.

Or maybe 2003, when James Lileks wrote: “For all these accusations to work, you have to believe that Republicans want poisoned water. You have to believe they drink different water than everyone else. And, of course, they do:”

Doubt it? Switch parties. Join the GOP, and see what happens: cheerful clean-cut uniformed men show up the next day, and take you off the city water lines. They’ll connect you to the special Republican water system that crosses the nation, supplying pure clean perfect water to GOP households. You can get it without Fluoride, too, as a sop to the Birchers and Goldie holdovers.

And there’s more! They’ll also install special GOP “screens” for your windows — they’ll trap airborne pollutants as small as three molecule across. You’ll also have access to rich, satisfying Republican sunshine, which tans you twice as fast — just look at Bob Dole! — and you’ll enjoy even-tempered Republican weather all year long. This is why Republicans don’t care about pollution, or bad water, or the ozone layer, or global warming: for all practical purposes, they’re not living on the same planet as the rest of the people, so they don’t care at all what happens to you.

True! All true! Invite a Republican over and hand him a glass of water. Watch him avoid drinking it — sometimes they spill it, sometimes they just say “I had water earlier today, thanks anyway” — and sometimes they sneak a little sponge out of their cuff, put it in their mouth and pretend to drink. Oh, they’re clever.

Well, if this isn’t true, then perhaps . . . maybe . . . there’s another side to this arsenic debate. Is it possible? Could it be?

Nahh, that’s just crazy talk.

Posted at 12:30 pm by Ed Driscoll 97

OLD AND BUSTED: The Democrats are the Working Man’s Party.

The New Hotness? The Democrats’ Brahmin Left Problem.

The Democrats have become and remain today a “Brahmin Left” party. “Brahmin Left” is a term coined by economist Thomas Piketty and colleagues to characterize Western left parties increasingly bereft of working-class voters and increasingly dominated by highly educated voters and elites, including of course our own Democratic Party. The Brahmin Left character of the party has evolved over many decades but spiked in the 21st century. The chart below illustrates this trend.

The chart does not show the most recent elections but election surveys agree that education polarization spiked further upward in both 2020 and 2024. Indeed, in the most reliable 2024 election survey the differential between unmodeled college and non-college Democratic support (compare the blue line in the chart) reached 27 points—literally off the Piketty chart and more than twice its level in the 2016 Piketty data.

It has not escaped the notice of many Democratic-sympathizing analysts that this ever-increasing education polarization—Brahminization—of the Democrats presents existential dangers to the party. Not only might the continued desertion of working-class (non-college) voters fatally undermine the Democrats’ electoral formula over time, the party’s fundamental purpose is being rapidly obliterated. What does it even mean to be the “progressive” party if the most educated and affluent voters are your most enthusiastic supporters? What does it mean to be “progressive” if working-class voters think your party mostly represents the values and priorities of those educated and affluent voters not their values and priorities?

Read the whole thing.

Posted at 12:00 pm by Ed Driscoll 122

IS THAT BETTER, WORSE, OR JUST WEIRDER THAN THE POSSIBILITY THAT WE’RE LIVING IN A SIMULATION? Unexpected JWST Observations Hint We Might Be Inside A Black Hole.

“If the observation shown here indeed reflects the structure of the Universe, it shows that the early universe was more homogeneous in terms of the directions towards which galaxies rotate, and becomes more chaotic over time while exhibiting a cosmological-scale axis that is close to the Galactic pole,” the team explains in their paper.

“Some cosmological models assume a geometry that features a cosmological-scale axis. These include ellipsoidal Universe, dipole big bang, and isotropic inflation. In these cases, the large-scale distribution of the galaxy rotation is aligned in the form of a cosmological-scale axis, and the location of that axis in close proximity to the Galactic pole can be considered a coincidence.”

One possibility suggested by the authors is that the preferred direction is the result of the universe being on the interior of a black hole of a larger universe.

Maybe it’s black holes all the way down.

Posted at 11:44 am by Stephen Green 153