Am I going insane or is CNN actually reporting an attempted assassination of Trump with, you know, a gun, that shoots bullets, in full public view, as "Trump rushed off stage after he falls at rally"?

Is it really so hard to write "apparent gunshots"? Is there some other well-known possibility to explain "loud bangs" followed by a bleeding man?

Ambient latent obsession with psychometrics obscures the fact that what mainly separates "normies" from the rest of us is not middling IQ but astounding and incurable cowardice. You have no idea how brave you are by just thinking your own thoughts in the safety of your own head. It's no wonder all the aristocrats of old—from all around the world—were obsessed with irrational honor and courage. More than intelligence or anything else, it is courage to the point of suicidal self-disregard that distinguishes someone as "not a normie."

The real "laboratory of democracy" has never been the very stable and centralized United States.

It has always been Latin America, where new experiments run every few years until the military or some dictator step in to reset the experiment, rinse, and repeat, again and again. It is a common misconception that all Latin American countries are alike because they are all politically and economically dysfunctional.

Sure, they are all dysfunctional. But they are dysfunctional in completely different and unique ways!

In a society where $1 trillion per year is spent on pensions, $1.74 trillion has been spent to subsidize empty credentialing, and $2.4 trillion has simply disappeared from the army coffers with no explanation, there is no such thing as "waste" or "scarcity," only "priorities."

https://twitter.com/mmjukic/status/1796472233227067655

The U.S., China, and—if truly federalized—even the EU are all unfathomably wealthy and large industrial states that can get away with serially inefficiently spending trillions and trillions of dollars on whatever they so please.

Science and industry have just made us that rich.

Daily reminder that elections do not matter in highly bureaucratized societies like modern Europe. That the colors on this chart shifted almost imperceptibly, like random static noise, in what is anyway an almost explicitly toothless, symbolic parliament, is not worth attention.

https://twitter.com/POLITICOEurope/status/1799875817163341824

That the "reduce immigration by 10%" party gained 10% more votes than the "increase immigration by 10%" party, which lost 10% of its votes, is not even a significant change if you take the system at face value, let alone when the system itself is non-functional by design.

The modern economy runs on intellectual dark matter that is rapidly aging, retiring, or dying, and going unreplaced and unsucceeded. As a result, the modern economy will slowly begin to fail for reasons that will seem magical, incomprehensible, or impossible to ascertain.

https://twitter.com/owl_poster/status/1798768342981087661

I think Boeing is a clear case of this happening, in its early stages. Absent reform that is likely too difficult to pull off, we are just waiting for a major disaster and, then, the slow realization that nobody knows how to prevent the next one.

Read: brief.bismarckanalysis.com/p/the-decay-of…

We have lived in an effectively post-scarcity society since 1885. Most political conflict since then has revolved around what to do with all the surplus we generated. The modern "services-oriented" economy is the solution we arrived at: give everyone fake jobs to LARP scarcity.

https://twitter.com/norvid_studies/status/1796246800182984889

The above statement is not exactly correct, but directionally correct in an important direction few talk about but which needs to be understood to solve our modern-day civilizational problems:

Long-term, industrial surplus was sunk into fake work, not more real work.

Americans readily admit that "quality of life" is higher in Europe. But they deny that Europe is wealthier than America because the GDP says so.

But there is actually no meaningful difference between "quality of life" and "wealth."

Americans are just being scammed by "GDP."

https://twitter.com/mmjukic/status/1779826873528185059

Europeans know they are being scammed by high taxes and overregulation.

Americans however convince themselves that healthcare is for losers, that driving two hours to work every day is what real men do, and that psychotically violent crime is just part and parcel of city life.

Europeans aren't poor. They are illiquid. Much of Europe's wealth is stored in safe streets, nice parks, public transit, "free" healthcare, etc. which, it turns out, are too socially expensive for Americans to maintain. Americans take the money instead. The rest is only natural.

https://twitter.com/Altimor/status/1779739328106930505

The EU has triple the population density of the United States and doesn't believe in "suburbs," just "cities." Given how much more space there is in America, it's surprising that the numbers are so close, if anything.

Daily reminder to teach your kids that they can easily find the e-mails and phone numbers of domain experts in any field online (e.g. a medical professor or a niche historian) and literally just politely ask them some questions, gaining priceless expert opinion for free. Daily reminder to teach your kids that, if they are smart enough and willing to put in the time, they can most likely learn everything the accountant or lawyer knows online, or from a book, and fill out the scary government forms themselves, thus saving thousands of dollars.

This week, a single pioneering donor gave gifts worth $640 million to hundreds of advocates of equity, environmentalism, public health, and gender justice.

Does anyone know how much advocates of space exploration, nuclear power, or good city governance received this week? When the directions of intellectual, ideological, artistic, and cultural philanthropy are lopsided by five orders of magnitude or so in one direction rather than another, it's hardly surprising that society follows in that direction.

The fact that outright billionaires are choosing to spend their time being irate online commentators and podcast hosts rather than, like, literally anything else productive, seems like a sign of one of the most important and unspoken sociological facts about modern America. Billionaires are poor.

Some academics got mad at my bespoke categorization of Africa's geo-economic regions, but it perfectly explains why colonial borders were drawn up so randomly.

They intentionally fragmented every natural economic region btw. multiple empires to maintain the balance of power! 🧵

https://twitter.com/mmjukic/status/1678410460960378881

French Africa wasn't some rational unified whole, it was most of the Maghreb and half of "The Gulf" divided by the Sahara.

They gave France and Italy bits of the Red Sea so that Britain couldn't just dominate it outright.

Germany got a random slice of every region, just cuz.

"The elite" is not shadowy or mysterious. America is ruled by technocratic lanky GenX Ivy League white guys who fly under the radar because they are powerful.

For example, pictured below are the American foreign minister, information minister, and AI minister.



While flaccid debates about Ukraine, wokeness, or AI safety or whatever soak up attention on here, the American foreign minister is fighting a global proxy war with Russia/China, and the American information minister is scientifically determining the correct level of wokeness.

Imagination: a closure of the Suez Canal will cause the total collapse of the world economy, globalization, and even the U.S. government

Reality: Egypt once unilaterally blocked the canal for *8 years* and literally nothing happened

Maritime shipping is just too easy: 🧵

https://twitter.com/NatashaBertrand/status/1736719614594150643

The fact that nobody even remembers when the Suez Canal was closed from 1967 to 1975 should be a testament to how irrelevant it actually is in an era of cheap, big, and fast cargo ships.

It's not like these ships are unable to sail around Africa rather than through the Canal.

When the USSR fell, Moscow's empire instantly lost -48.6% of its population -38.8% of GDP.

For comparison, this is how it would look if the U.S. broke apart with the same ratios today.

I think this more than anything explains why KGB officer Putin is so fixated on Ukraine: 🧵 Putin has called the collapse of the Soviet Union a "genuine tragedy" and "the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the [20th] century" since at least 2005.

Quantifying this, the catastrophe is that Moscow lost control over half the Soviet population and a third of its economy.

We still live in a society of geocentric creationists.

For 98% of people "evolution/Big Bang" just occupies the slot where "God" once did.

We must integrate the meaning of a snowball planet of alien creatures, battered by asteroids or worse.

A 🧵on the last 4.5 billion years:



Some wacky people try to fit dinosaurs into 3000 BC.

"Scientifically rebutting" them is a meaningless achievement, because it fails to address the actual and very deep problem:

How can we possibly put the starting point of meaningful history *after* dragons walked the Earth?

I think the real replacement fertility rate is not 2.1 kids per woman.

It's 5.1 kids.

A recent Swedish study found that in a generation born 1885-1899, an incredible 25% of people who had 2 kids had *zero* descendants by 2007!

For 1 kid? 50%.

A 🧵 on long-term fertility:

The 2.1 number seems intuitive and is taken as moral or life advice.

Two is good enough to sustain populations. More would dilute investment in each child or cause overpopulation.

But it is actually just a statistical artifact that varies considerably based on mortality.

We definitely do not talk enough about the insane depopulation of Eastern Europe since 1990. Wars, aging, and emigration.

In 1990, Ukraine & Turkey were even. Turkey is now double Ukraine's pop.

For many countries this depopulation literally surpasses the death tolls of WWII. Estimates say the Soviet Union had WWII casualties equiv. to 13% of its 1939 population.

Ukraine has lost -28.9% since 1990.

Romania is at 4% compared to -18.5%. Hungary at about 6% and -6.8%.

Yugoslavia was also at 6% casualties; Croatia has lost -19% since 1990, Serbia -12%.

Only one country comes close to disrupting U.S. hegemony in global popular culture:

Japan.

But why them?

Because popular culture isn't a subjective art form but an industrial export Japan's military funded for WWII propaganda to defeat Disney.

A 🧵 on industrial pop culture:



First, the evidence. Of the 50 highest-grossing films ever, 94% are based on U.S./UK intellectual property (IP).

The other 6% are Japanese. No other countries.

Japan is also 56% of the top 50 video games and 28% of the top media franchises, including number one: Pokémon.

Most people have no mental model for distinguishing between criminal offenses and social norm violations.

This means justice systems will over time tend to punish all social norm violations criminally.

Much of U.S. legal thought is premised on this not being the case. There is this Anglo-American idea of an objective rational justice system that judicially (pun intended) punishes crime and metes out justice, leaving aside mere violations of social norms protected by constitutions and liberties and rights and so on.