EVERYTHING IS GOING SWIMMINGLY, GUYS! Wait, Trump Is Up By *How Much* Now? Dems Are Going to Implode.
Author Archive: Glenn Reynolds
May 17, 2025
GOOD NEWS FOR THE CRUISE INDUSTRY: Oral norovirus vaccine candidate successfully tested in human challenge trial.
A TRUMP CHANGE: You Hate Start/Stop Tech, and the EPA Chief Agrees: Here’s What Might Happen. “In a post on X, Zeldin said the Environmental Protection Agency is ‘fixing’ the tech, adding bluntly: ‘Everyone hates it.'”
ANY CUSTOMER COULD TELL YOU THIS IS A LIE: Meta argues enshittification isn’t real in bid to toss FTC monopoly case.. I’d love to go back to the Facebook of 2009.
((Fixed a typo. –Charlie) fixed a typo in fixing a typo. —Charlie)
MARS AIN’T THE KIND OF PLACE TO RAISE YOUR KIDS. IN FACT IT’S COLD AS HELL. Mars weather: Clear with a low of 114 below zero.
Plenty of heat for your colony once you get a nice nuclear plant going, though. And highs are in the 70s.
BIRTHRATES: Baby bonuses won’t solve the birthrate problem: Only culture, not cash, can spark a new boom in having kids.
Baby bonuses prove “costly and ineffective” almost everywhere they are tried, wrote Leonard Lopoo, a professor of public administration and international affairs at Syracuse University, in a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed. Considering how expensive it can be to raise a child — roughly $300,000 over 18 years, according to a new LendingTree analysis — what difference is a relatively modest “baby bonus” going to make? The prospect of a government check might induce a couple already committed to parenthood to get pregnant a little sooner. But is it going to convince adults who don’t want a baby to change their minds? Hardly.
Government benefits and incentives may have some impact at the margins, but ultimately the only real strategy for reversing demographic decline is to change cultural norms surrounding marriage and child-rearing. That is the lesson from Israel, the one advanced country where the fertility rate remains far above replacement level, at more than 2.9 children per woman. All the factors that usually lead to falling birthrates are present in Israel: a rising cost of living, pronounced female participation in the workforce, high rates of education, easily accessible birth control, expensive housing. Yet fertility remains incredibly robust — not only among Israel’s most traditional and religious communities, but also among the far more numerous Israelis who live modern or secular lifestyles.
“The real secret to Israel’s fertility rates appears to be cultural,” wrote Danielle Kubes in Canada’s National Post in 2023. “The family is at the absolute center of Israeli life. Getting married and having kids is the highest cultural value.” It is a value that goes beyond religious observance and political ideology. It cannot be explained by government financial aid (welfare benefits in Israel are comparable to those in Western Europe). Rather, it boils down to this: Israelis of every stripe share a conviction that having children is the best and highest means of imbuing life with meaning.
Related: Harrison Butker, Harbinger: Life during and after the coming Demographic Winter.
THIS NEEDS TO BE STOPPED, IN A WAY THAT SETS AN EXAMPLE THAT WILL PREVENT FUTURE ELECTION CANCELING:
setting up another bullshit Russia predicate to invalidate Poland’s elections in case the wrong party wins this weekend https://t.co/zOBdxOQhr6
— Mike Benz (@MikeBenzCyber) May 17, 2025
THEY GAVE HIM THE NUCLEAR BUTTONS AND THEY KEPT SECRET HOW BAD HE WAS:
🚨BREAKING: Audio from Biden’s 2023 interview with Special Counsel Robert Hur has dropped.
He forgets names, dates, and stumbles through every single answer.
He was completely checked out.
pic.twitter.com/3LdlKfQbem— Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) May 16, 2025
THERE’S A LOT OF THAT STUFF GOING AROUND: Matching Teens to “Groomers” Was Once Part of This Company’s Business: A major antitrust trial takes an “ancillary” detour to a chilling tour of online life.
The idea that FB/IG had “work to do” on “grooming,” and that certain kinds of underfunding were “deliberate,” became more explicit when an exhibit was introduced, an internal study from the next year, 2019, titled “Inappropriate Interactions with Children on Instagram.”
Hmm.
May 16, 2025
THE NEW SPACE RACE: China launches first of 2,800 satellites for AI space computing constellation.
MORE DIE OF HEARTBREAK: Men Are Dying From ‘Broken Heart Syndrome’ at Twice The Rate of Women.
JUSTICE:
🚨BREAKING: Former FBI Director James Comey is reportedly under Secret Service escort to the Washington Field Office for questioning by investigators. pic.twitter.com/JvmW3FSYzy
— Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) May 16, 2025
“JUSTICE:” SCOTUS to CASA to A.A.R.P.: In Case Of (Perceived) Emergency, Ignore The Rules, And Make Stuff Up: None of the usual rules will apply when the ACLU says there is an emergency.. The ACLU sees itself as part of the judicial system, not as a party. Some of the courts see it the same way.
The past 24 hours have been something of a Rorschach Test for the Supreme Court. In the birthright citizenship case, the Court made clear that in emergencies, the judiciary must retain the power to enter universal injunctions, even if Article III does not otherwise permit such injunctions. And in A.A.R.P. v. Trump, the Court made clear that in emergencies, the court should certify a class without going through Rule 23, and grant an ex parte tro without considering any of the usual TRO factors.
What lesson should lower court judges take away? In cases of perceived emergencies, forget all the rules and make stuff up. When the executive branch takes such actions we call it an autocracy. When the courts do it, they call it the “rule of law.”
Krytocracy is not stable.
WELL, THIS IS THE 21ST CENTURY, YOU KNOW: World’s first patient treated with personalized CRISPR gene editing therapy.