Thoughts on Coming Apart and the Coming Great Reset

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer
Kit Webster
The Rubicon Is Here, also
We Are At The Beginning Of The Middle Of The End Game
Something to be Positive About
February 14, 2025
Themes and Theses - Why I'm Contemplating Out Loud
(Initially formulated in the early 90s, following decades of reading history, philosophy, psychology and a lot of contemplation, particularly on the subject of cycles. In the end, this is a relatively straightforward story about human nature and of history rhyming.)
The US will enter a period of crisis in the early 2000s. In the late 90s, I incorporated Strauss' and Howe's terminology of the Fourth Turning (without incorporating their generations paradigm) and agreed with Howe that the end stage of the crisis began with the Great Financial Crisis and would last into the early 2030s. We are not yet to the middle of the end stage of the crisis.
The crisis will be serious and could be existential.
Internal strife will increase, up to and including secession and civil war.
International conflicts will increase as the vacuum created by the weakening of the US is filled by other players.
There will be many threads to the crisis, but the primary thread will be debt, deficits and entitlements. Other factors include, eg, demographics, a loss of meaning and myth and a loss of self-discipline.
Politics will move leftward as citizens look for some refuge from the chaos. The US will become increasingly susceptible to a (man) on a white horse, who can come from either the left or the right.
Inflation, as the most likely way to address debt since austerity is not politically acceptable, will significantly lower standards of living, exacerbating the civil crises.
Eventually, the dollar will be inflated away and lose its reserve status.
Once the old rot is cleared out, and assuming continuity, there will be the basis for the establishment of a new order.
(Added around 2020) The loss of faith by our youth in our founding principles means that the new order will at least partially be based on new principles. As yet, I have no visibility as to what those principles might be.
(Added in the early 00s) While humans are contributing to global warming, policies implemented to address manmade global warming will create a significant energy crisis, probably toward the end of the Fourth Turning.
(Added in 2023) The lowering / elimination of standards in education, the judiciary, law enforcement, the military and other segments of our society will create a population unable to adequately comprehend, do or respond to the challenges of democracy and culture.
Quotes to Contemplate
If you believe that our debt situation is a major crisis, as I do, then you need bold thoughts and bold actions. - Jim Bianco
The Orwellian Big Brother punishing you for expressing an impolitic thought is now the law of the land in the land of Orwell - Rupa Subramanya
I want to assure you that we are not afraid of exploring anything within the law, and we have a lawyer who will declare anything you want to do legal. - Harry Hopkins, FDR's Commerce Secretary
When autocracy is popular no one wants to hear that autocracy is bad. Because people have a really annoying tendency to think anything they like must also be good and constitutional. - Jonah Goldberg
> Primary Ideas in This Week's Post
The confrontation between Trump and the courts has begun. I would bet that he will defy some of the courts' orders. Then we shall have a full-blown Constitutional crisis.
The good Trump is taking many bold steps to correct the dysfunction and corruption in our country and the existential crises of debt, deficits and entitlements.
The ironies with all of these steps he is taking include the degree of authoritarianism (the bad) Trump is using to save the democracy and his own level of corruption weeding out the corruption in the system. If all goes according to what I think the plan is, his liabilities are being wiped clean while his wealth is increasing immensely.
It's the American way, and to some extent the way it should be - increasing litigation everywhere.
USAID did a lot of good, and was a septic tank of corruption and special dealing.
New Jersey is beginning to involuntarily commit the mentally ill. A very big step toward addressing homelessness.
Trump appears to be taking control of negotiations on Ukraine without consulting NATO partners. This may be part of a grand strategy to put arms reduction on the table and include China in those talks.
I routinely use 5-6 different AI models. DeepSeek is very good in addressing my tasks, which are principally research and writing (I will always disclose when anything in these posts is AI generated).
The Smurfs are coming back!
If they are not politically correct, a la Sleeping Beauty, then that could be our first ray of sunshine in a long time.
The Beginning of the Middle of the End Game
We're in a hell of a mess.
But you knew that.
That has been my theme for over 30 years now - we are going to get into a hell of a mess. And it is going to get worse from here. We basically have to take apart the system we have now and create a new one. The old one has morphed into dysfunctionality.
Gradually over time, inch by inch, we have all taken for granted what is important and we have given up on our foundational values. I'm talking about each of us, not just the Proud Boys or the purple-hair-with-nose-ring set.
We are a shadow of our former selves. Existentially in debt with corruption everywhere. We have screwed up a perfectly good country.
We do not like to think of ourselves that way, but that's the way it is.
That's the way it almost certainly had to turn out as we took so many trends to their extremes, including individuality and the financialization and gamification of everything.
I have written about this ad nauseum, and have a pretty good batting average.
So, Trump is directionally correct - not about everything, but about many things - about enough things to provide him support from about half the country.
The extraordinary irony is that he is the embodiment of much that is wrong with us - a corrupt narcissist. I would have personally preferred a philosopher king, but they are in short supply, and it is clear that the gods are having their fun with us.
But, it took Nixon to go to China, and it took Trump to speak uncomfortable truths (and some pretty blatant lies).
He is doing some things that need to be done, but he is tromping all over the Constitution in order to do it. That part of this is Congress's fault by vacating the field only compounds the felony. The way it was put during the Vietnam War was, "We had to destroy the village in order to save it."
The details were always in question, but the broad brush of the future was painted in 1944 with the Bretton Woods Agreement, essentially making the US dollar the world's reserve currency. We decided that we were going to dominate the world. We almost fumbled the ball, but recovered it in the early 70s when Saudi Arabia agreed to sell oil in dollars in return for the US's agreement to offer them security. In the early days, all was good as we gained the "extraordinary privilege" of having the world's reserve currency. However, there is no such thing as a free lunch. Triffin's Dilemma is part and parcel of a reserve currency, and it was unleashed, leading to the hollowing out of US manufacturing and the US incurring mountains of debt (our loss of self discipline did not help anything, either). That's the grand bargain - you can luxuriate in the reserve currency for decades, but you have sold your soul in return for Triffin's Dilemma. There will be hell to be paid.
At some point, maybe between 2012 and 2015, we ran out of constructive alternatives.
And here we are.
I still think that there is a good probability of a (man) on a white horse at the end of this cycle (oligarchies also work), and I don't think Trump is it. I don't think he is up to the task, including being old; I don't think a significant-enough portion of the population is sufficiently upset; and, although wounded, I think the empire will strike back and be able to contain the damage.
If I were to point to an actually critical, perhaps existential election, it would probably be 2028, but it may be as late as 2032.
I think that Trump's election signals the beginning of the middle of the end game.
But, the game's afoot, and life is about to get much more volatile, and interesting, in the may-you-live-in-interesting-times meaning of the word.
Hang on.
Regeneration is most likely in our cards, but probably not for another 5-10 years, yet.
(Wikipedia - The Triffin dilemma (sometimes the Triffin paradox) is the conflict of economic interests that arises between short-term domestic and long-term international objectives for countries whose currencies serve as global reserve currencies. This dilemma was identified in the 1960s by Belgian-American economist Robert Triffin. He noted that a country whose currency is the global reserve currency, held by other nations as foreign exchange (FX) reserves to support international trade, must somehow supply the world with its currency in order to fulfill world demand for these FX reserves. This supply function is nominally accomplished by international trade, with the country holding reserve currency status being required to run an inevitable trade deficit. After going off of the gold standard in 1971 and setting up the petrodollar system later in the 1970s, the United States accepted the burden of such an ongoing trade deficit in 1985 with its permanent transformation from a creditor to a debtor nation. The U.S. goods trade deficit is currently on the order of one trillion dollars per year. Such a continuing drain to the United States in its balance of trade leads to ongoing tension between its national trade policies and its global monetary policy to maintain the U.S. dollar as the current global reserve currency.)
Mauldin on USAID
Kit- another example of two of my truisms: all trends are taken to their extremes; the road to hell is paved with good intentions. The tragedy here is that some of this money is going to "good" causes, and, good or bad, there is someone on the other side of every dollar spent. Here's John:
USAID is turning out to be a giant slush fund. As with the Department of Education, some of the programs are "good," and, as with the Department of Education, someone who is receiving either justified or unjustified payments will feel the pain of the money being with drawn. Here are John Mauldin's recent comments:
The US Agency for International Development, which was supposed to be a tool of helping less fortunate nations and advancing US soft power, has now been exposed as a slush fund for many left-wing policies, an organization that had no serious adult supervision, Many reports suggest the agency has been doing things a large majority of the country would oppose.
Here are a few examples I’ve seen on social media (but have not independently verified).
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$2 million for Moroccan pottery classes.
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$11 million to tell Vietnam to stop burning trash.
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Payments for transgender programs all over the world.
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DEI programs all over the world
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$8 million to Politico, large amounts to the BBC? And I can guarantee you that there was no similar aid to National Review or Newsmax, LOL. (And there shouldn’t be ever!)
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Hundreds of millions of dollars to build schools and other theoretically good projects that Google maps shows either don’t exist or, that onsite inspection shows are abandoned or shoddily built. Can someone say corruption? Payoffs? Money laundering? CIA cutouts (don’t be naïve)?
Seriously, go to X and type in USAID and tell me how many of those programs you would support. Why does Black Lives Matter get foreign aid?
Yes, I get that USAID supports feeding the poor, helping refugees and all sorts of wonderful humanitarian programs that are truly needed. The vast majority of American citizens would support those.
Let me make a side bet. Come to me in 12 months and point out which one of those truly important programs didn’t survive under the auspices of the State Department. I am fairly confident they will.
It's Rubicon Time
I have discussed this Trump presidency under the headlines, So You Say You Want A Revolution, and Crossing The Rubicon and discussed past instances in which presidents have defied the Supreme Court. We are heading for a very big, serious, potentially existential disruption of our institutions and Constitution.
There is a large amount of litigation pushing back against Trump. I have noted that we will face a Constitutional crisis when (note I did not say, if) Trump defies the courts, particularly the Supreme Court.
While I noted that I agree with several of the actions Trump is taking, I do not agree with his methods.
Well, we are there.
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Trump cut off certain funding.
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A court said stop.
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Trump did not stop.
They are planning on confrontations.
Conservative attorney George Conway was on Morning Joe and discussed the vice president's social media posts saying federal judges aren't allowed to control a president and why he says the White House won't obey court orders.
Republican strategist Scott Jennings said during a CNN appearance that the Trump administration should ignore federal court rulings that don’t fall in line with the president’s policy objectives
And here we are.
In a move I did not expect so soon (I thought it was probably coming sooner or later) Musk called for the impeachment of the judge that, in a separate ruling, blocked Doge access to Treasury payment data and systems. Perhaps THE authoritarian move.
And here we are.
If it gets serious, the only action that can be taken is impeachment.
If the president does not yield to impeachment, then we are down to the military, because they are the only ones who have any force beyond cultural and institutional boundaries.
And that would be a pretty bad place to be.
Something I'm Enthusiastic About
There're the bad Trump and the good Trump.
I want to talk about the good Trump for a second.
I believe that our country has been slowly devolving into stasis and corruption, and that the debt, deficit and entitlement issues are existential.
Trump is addressing these issues with bold, creative actions.
I don't support many of the people he has in his inner circle, but maybe they are the only ones who can get this done. The Harrises, Bidens, Bushes, Obamas and Clintons of the world certainly would not have - we would have just sailed over the cliff.
I don't support many of his actions - they are broad, take-no-prisoners approaches. But maybe that is what is necessary to untie our many Gordian knots.
There will be a lot of broken eggs and a large number of institutions to rebuild. There will be a significant decrease in our standard of living, primarily because of the coming devaluations of the dollar. But all of those things were inevitable in any event.
Trump is trying to literally create a new world in four years. Seems a big ask and all of the people with vested interests in the old system will oppose him mightily, not to mention the Democrats, who will do it just because.
Instead of leaving it all to chance, Trump is taking many bulls by the horns.
So, three cheers for the good Trump.
Markets
> No change in outloook
> Not sure whether he is serious, but Musk is hinting that there are irregularities in the issuance of Treasury Bonds. I can't imagine, but if it is true, it could literally be Earth shaking.
> Something that Luke Gromen has been discussing that just showed up on CNBC and Trump might have the audacity to do is to revalue gold. It's complicated, but the result is to provide the government with more money to spend at the cost of a much lower dollar. When I am talking about revaluation, it is not clear what the number would be, but it would be big - $4,000+ per ounce. In effect, that kind of move would collapse long periods of gradual inflation into one, large step- like what FDR did when he revalued gold, after confiscating it. It would not be fun, but some variation of that is inevitably in our future.
> Then, Macrovoices had Jim Bianco on its most recent podcast. Wow! Just, Wow! Trump is letting loose all kinds of forces, including, essentially, financial revolution. Listen to the podcast, because there are wheels within wheels. Everybody knows that our debt and deficits are not sustainable, but it seems that there is a group being very creative in thinking about the problem.
> US inflation rose to 3% in January.
So, You Say You Want A Revolution?
> The empire strikes back - including litigation as far as the eye can see.
- Now begins the really tricky part - Federal Judge John J. McConnell Jr. ruled Monday that the Trump administration is defying his Jan. 29 order to release billions in federal grants, marking the first explicit judicial declaration of the White House disobeying a court order. Some legal scholars are raising the alarm that a constitutional crisis could be brewing.
- VERY BIG - Elon Musk has called for the impeachment of an Obama-appointed judge who barred DOGE and the Treasury Secretary from accessing payment systems at the US Treasury.
- Judge Halts Access to Treasury Payment Systems by Elon Musk’s Team - including the Treasury Secretary (!).
- China has imposed retaliatory tariffs on the US, hitting about $14bn worth of goods and dashing hopes that a trade war between the world’s two largest economies could be avoided.
- A judge blocked Trump from making huge cuts to biomedical research funding in 22 states.
- A pause on Trump’s federal worker resignation offer was extended, then dropped.
- Federal judge John Bates has ordered the Trump administration to restore HHS, CDC, and FDA websites providing information on sex change operations and gender ideology.
- A federal judge halted the Trump administration’s plan to cut federal funding for hospitals that offer gender-transition treatments for people under 19.
> Now we are finally getting to the important stuff - Trump is going to counter the ban on plastic straws.
> President Trump said he will be revoking former President Biden’s security clearance and stopping the former commander-in-chief’s daily intelligence briefings.
> Trump signed an executive order to establish a White House Faith Office in an effort to empower faith-based entities.
> Trump said he would dismiss several board members from the Kennedy Center, and install himself as chairman.
Daily Telegraph article - I’m a Democrat politician. This is why I sterilised myself after Trump’s election Laurie Pohutsky, 36, opens up on decision to voluntarily forgo having children rather than raising them under new Republican government.
> Hoo boy! They are talking about auditing funds sent to Ukraine and also auditing the Federal Reserve. I'm willing to buy tickets to these two events.

> The administration halted funding for EV charging stations.
> Trump halts the minting of pennies.
> Trump signed an executive order Friday halting all “non-essential” assistance to South Africa. He also ordered American agencies to assist white South Africans fleeing racial discrimination and resettle them as refugees in the US.
> Russell Vought—the newly confirmed head of the Office of Management and Budget—took over as acting director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) and ordered the agency to cease its operations.
The Kansas City Chiefs memes are brutal, but here's the one that best fits the theme of this section - Never realized how much the Chiefs depended on funding from USAID.
> Trump mass-fires boards of U.S. military academies for being woke.
> The FBI just discovered about 2,400 records tied to President Kennedy's assassination that were never provided to a board tasked with reviewing and disclosing the documents.
> Trump signed an executive order Monday imposing 25% tariffs on all steel and aluminum imports to the US.
> Trump issued an executive order on Monday pausing the Justice Department’s enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which bars American companies from bribing foreign governments in exchange for doing business in the country.
> Canada’s Liberal party was left for dead, but Trump might have just given it a second chance.
> “If they’re (the Israeli hostages) not returned—all of them, not in drips and drabs. . . Saturday at 12 o’clock,” said Trump. “After that, I would say all hell is going to break out.”
> Senator Chuck Schumer announced the launch of a whistleblower reporting portal, aimed at allowing federal employees to report corruption, abuse of power, and threats to public safety within the government.
Thousands of Danish citizens are launching an effort to buy California as a response to Trump’s attempt to take Greenland. They say they will provide Californians with “rule of law, universal health care, fact-based politics, and a lifetime supply of Danish pastries.”
One commentator said that the terms were acceptable only if they take Chicago, too.
> The House Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets is authorized to “examine the declassification and release of documents pertaining to the (1) assassination of President John F. Kennedy, (2) assassination of Senator Robert F. Kennedy, (3) assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., (4) Unidentified Anomalous Phenomenon and existence of extra-terrestrial life, and other such matters at the discretion of the Chairman.”
> The four FEMA employees who sent $59,000,000 to luxury hotels in NYC for illegal immigrants have been fired according to DHS. "These 4 employees circumvented DHS leadership and unilaterally made egregious payments to hotels for illegals in NYC..."
> The Securities and Exchange Commission announced Tuesday that it will not defend a Biden-era rule requiring publicly held companies to disclose climate-related risks and in some cases the details of their emissions.
> Trump issued an executive order Tuesday extending more power to Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, or “DOGE.” The directive gives DOGE oversight on hiring and requires federal agencies to work with the team to “eliminate waste, bloat, and insularity” through “large-scale” personnel reductions, consistent with applicable laws.
> The Telegraph - Disney has scrapped its trigger warnings for children’s cartoons such as Dumbo in a bonfire of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) policies... (Kit - "I done seen everything, when I seen an elephant fly.)
> This is BIG. Trump is pushing on Putin for discussions on Ukraine. Trump is bypassing Europe; Trump and Putin will meet; Trump wants to get to an arms-reduction agreement with Russia and China.
> Vance, in effect, announced that the US's approach to Nato was changing.
> The Department of Education rescinded recent Title IX guidance that schools’ NIL payments to male and female athletes must be proportionate.
A deeply unserious campaign for Denmark to purchase California from the United States gained significant traction online this week, following President Donald Trump’s repeated calls to purchase Greenland, an autonomous Danish territory. So far, more than 200,000 people have signed the virtual petition to “Måke Califørnia Great Ægain.”
> From The Free Press - Trump pardoned former Illinois governor and Celebrity Apprentice contestant Rod Blagojevich, who was convicted of corruption in 2009 after attempting to sell Barack Obama’s vacant U.S. Senate seat to the highest bidder. Later the same day, Trump’s Department of Justice ordered federal prosecutors in Manhattan to drop charges against New York mayor Eric Adams, a newfound Trump ally who was under investigation for taking bribes from the Turkish government. (Kit - imo, the dropping charges against Adams is probably a corrupt quid pro quo.)
> The Justice Department says it’s taking legal action against the State of New York and Governor Kathy Hochul over its alleged resistance to the Trump administration’s crackdown on illegal immigration.
> The Worcester City Council has approved a petition declaring Massachusetts’ second-largest municipality as a sanctuary for “transgender and gender-diverse people” after hearing residents compare the Trump administration to Nazis.
> The border has been quiet since Trump took office: Apprehensions last week were down 91 percent compared to a year before, which was significantly down from the early Biden years.
> Trump announced "reciprocal tariffs," that is, if you charge me 15%, I will charge you 15%. America has historically charged the least amount of tariffs in the world, while paying other countries' tariffs. This was part of America's promoting world trade. Trump has decided to take a different course, reflecting quid pro quo.
> RFK Jr was confirmed. Imo, a deeply, deeply flawed man. Fingers crossed that the does more good than harm. I do think the good news is that he will hold Trump's feet to the fire on revelations of secrets, from JFK to PDiddy.
> This has an interesting kernel of truth - Velina Tchakarova - Now that NATO membership is off the table for Ukraine, the only realistic path to ensuring its survival is acquiring nuclear weapons. With the US stepping back, the responsibility for Europe’s nuclear deterrence falls on the UK and France - extending to what remains of Ukraine.
Um, well ... Maxine Waters says Elon Musk and Trump are ”violating our privacy, and we don’t know what they have on us.” (Maxine was my poster child for dim bulbs in Congress until Marjorie Taylor Green came along.)
> Imo, the Gaza thing is yet another of Trump's threats to provoke action. In this case, I think he wants the Middle East to take care of its own problem, instead of neglecting the Palestinian problem all together, which is what they do best.
Short Takes
> Very big - from The Free Press -
Last week, Marko Elez, a DOGE staffer, resigned after The Wall Street Journal revealed that the 25-year-old had made a series of racist comments under a pseudonym on X, including “Normalize Indian hate,” and “I was racist before it was cool.” He also called on the United States to implement “eugenic immigration policy.”
Then Musk posted a poll on—where else?—X, asking if he should rehire Elez. When the online masses said yes—and J.D. Vance backed Elez’s return—Elon did just that. It’s the latest sign that cancel culture is over.
> We are becoming unhinged - More than 10 per cent of farmland in England is set to be diverted towards helping to achieve net zero and protecting wildlife by 2050. England could disappear from the planet entirely and the global warming needle would barely budge.
> Following up on DeepSeek, Gavekal's Tilly Zhang summed it up well:
“DeepSeek stunned the AI industry with the release of two new models: V3 in December 2024 and R1 in January 2025. These perform roughly as well as OpenAI’s leading models on tasks such as math and coding. But the most striking aspect is the cost: DeepSeek said training the V3 model required 2,048 of Nvidia’s H800 chips—a downgraded last-generation chip designed to comply with US export controls on China—at a cost of US$5.6mn. By contrast, OpenAI has said it spent more than US$100mn to train ChatGPT-4.
“DeepSeek’s achievements may not be quite as impressive as headlines imply. For starters, the new models have shortcomings. One of the key reasons they perform well despite limited access to advanced chips is due to their ‘Mixture of Experts’ approach. This means available computing power is concentrated on a few ‘expert’ tasks, while less-critical tasks may be undertrained. The models thus excel in certain areas, but their overall performance is less consistent than some rivals. For instance, one Chinese AI expert has noted that one of the models performs well on math and coding tests, but correctly answered only about half of some other classic AI test questions. In short, the models are specialists adapted to become generalists.
“The US$5.6mn price tag should also not be taken too literally. One reason DeepSeek’s costs are low is that the company’s offerings have so far focused only on text-based large-language models, while some US rivals offer multimodal models that can handle images and videos, making direct cost comparisons misleading. Another is that the company can piggyback on the costly earlier advances made and lessons learned by US AI firms. Finally, the much-cited cost figure doesn’t account for prior research and development spending. DeepSeek’s parent company reportedly had an initial research and development budget of around RMB3bn, as well as a stockpile of about 10,000 of Nvidia’s advanced A100 chips, meaning the actual cost of development was almost certainly much higher.
“Nonetheless, the company achieved an unambiguous innovation in software architecture that allowed it to deliver strong performance on many tasks at a low cost. That reflects a broader strategy among Chinese technology firms in response to US export controls: using software to get more out of less-advanced hardware. A 2023 review of Tencent’s Hunyuan AI model by the Berkeley AI Research Lab, for instance, concluded that ‘[s]oftware advancements are making old hardware increasingly useful.’
> More DeepSeek from the MIT Technology Review - These early figures—based on the performance of one of DeepSeek’s smaller models on a small number of prompts—suggest it could be more energy intensive when generating responses than the equivalent-size model from Meta.
The issue might be that the energy it saves in training is offset by its more intensive techniques for answering questions, and by the long answers they produce. Add the fact that other tech firms, inspired by DeepSeek’s approach, may now start building their own similar low-cost reasoning models, and the outlook for energy consumption is already looking a lot less rosy.
> Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson has told members of the press that members of Congress should be focusing less on arresting and deporting illegal alien criminals and more on slavery reparations.
Nature is healing - the Smurfs are coming back! Now, just for me, maybe The Lone Ranger and Roy Rogers? (My favorite was actually Hopalong Cassidy - the problem is that it would not work without Clayton Moore, Roy Rogers and William Boyd.)
> New Jersey will not provide financial backing to new offshore wind projects, Gov. Phil Murphy’s administration announced Monday.
Congratulations are in order for New Zealand’s Mount Taranaki, which is now legally recognized as a person (it's a Māori thing).
> Drama students are being warned of suicide in Romeo and Juliet after a university put more than 200 trigger warnings on works of Shakespeare. The University of the West of England has issued warnings for “blood” and “psychological trauma” in Macbeth as well as “storms” and “extreme weather” in The Tempest. One theatre show of the shipwreck play was highlighted for containing the “popping of balloons”.
> NASA - While still an extremely low possibility, asteroid 2024 YR4's impact probability with Earth has increased from about 1% to a 2.3% chance on Dec. 22, 2032. As we observe the asteroid more, the impact probability will become better known.
> Newsom tells Pacific Palisades property owners: "You can't rebuild the same. We have to rebuild with science. We have to build with climate reality in mind."
> This is big. It has been clear to me for decades that not being able to involuntarily commit the mentally ill is very bad policy. I understand the potential for abuse, but there are downsides to everything, all the time. Sometimes you have to pick the least bad. So, we get the homeless, many (most?) of whom are mentally ill. From The Economist -
Involuntary commitment laws in New York state go back decades, but the idea fell out of favour after the closing of asylums. Over the past few years politicians in New York who were opposed have embraced it. Since 2022 Eric Adams, the city’s mayor, has instructed police and first responders to hospitalise people with severe mental illness who are incapable of looking after themselves. Kathy Hochul, the governor, has announced plans to “add more teeth” to the state laws on involuntary treatment and is promising more money. This builds on what is already happening in New York City.
Here a culture change is under way, says Brian Stettin, the mayor’s adviser on severe mental illness. “It’s just not going to be acceptable anymore to walk by people who are in a psychiatric crisis and are in desperate need of medical care.”
> Remix News - In two speeches given less than 24 hours apart in the French city of Toulouse, Jean-Luc Mélenchon delivered some of the most shocking yet brutally honest words from a European politician, openly calling for the older French to be replaced by a “Creole” generation of mixed races and cultures.
The leader of France’s far-left LFI is calling outright for replacement of White French people, conjuring up the Great Replacement term that has been demonized as a conspiracy theory by the left for years.
“In our country, one person in four has a foreign grandparent. 40% of the population speaks at least two languages. We are destined to be a Creole nation and so much the better! May the young generation be the great replacement for the old generation,” said Mélenchon.
> Judge orders New York OB-GYN to stop sending abortion pills to Texas, pay $100K fine. This one's going to the Supreme Court.
> Kamala Harris is dominating the polls for the 2026 California governor's race.
Miscellany
The Bee wins again. Adam spotted wearing t-shirt in the Garden of Eden.

(For those of you not up on your Book of Genesis, Adam was created first, before Eve.)

Too soon?

