NEWS YOU CAN USE: A guide to the “platonic ideal” of a Negroni and other handy tips.

TARIFFS UNTHINKABLY BAD FOR TRADE, “CARBON TAXES” UNIMAGINABLY GOOD: Countries agree to reduce maritime emissions, tax carbon offenders.

NOBODY TRUSTS YOU GUYS, SIT DOWN: WHO working group makes progress on pandemic preparedness plan.

“THE OBJECT OF POWER IS POWER.” Liberal Canadian PM Mark Carney Runs on Banning Free Speech if Elected Canadian Prime Minister (Video).

THEY’VE BEEN LUKEWARM ON THIS STUFF: It’s Time for the Supreme Court to Define ‘Proximate Cause’ in Firearm Advertising Liability Claims.

As I’ve noted, the judiciary suffers from a lot of built-in class bias.

IT’S NOT LIKE THEY CANCELLED PEOPLE FOR SAYING POSITIVE THINGS ABOUT COLONIALISM OR SOMETHING: UC free speech conference decries Trump admin’s ‘destructive effort to attack’ university research.

UNSURPRISING: Most Americans support Trump crackdown on anti-Semitism on campus, new poll shows.

CHANGE: Burgum Says ‘Build, Baby, Build.’

GOOD: Stanford Activists Charged with Felonies for Building Takeover.

THIS IS MY IMPRESSION, TOO: “Young people in the city are very boring now. I am only in my early 30s but the difference between 10 years ago is stark.”

HMM: Alex Berenson: A scientist offers a simple, fascinating theory why mRNA jabs may have caused diffuse problems in so many people. “Bench scientists in academia and at the mRNA companies can be talking aggressively to each other about how to develop and improve this still-novel biotechnology, even as the scientific establishment circles the wagons against outside questioners.”

HERITABLE CHARACTERISTICS: It’s Not Who You Know, It’s Who You Are.

Children resemble their parents. When the resemblance is physical, we usually think it’s funny or cute. But when the resemblance is financial, it’s an Issue. Non-economists debate the merits of the cynic’s maxim that, “It’s not what you know, it’s who you know.” Economists debate the magnitude of the intergenerational income correlation.

During the past two weeks, I’ve been reading all the articles I can find on this subject. Here’s my three stage summary:

Stage 1 (1970s-80s): The intergenerational income correlation is low, about .2. This shows that capitalism is pretty fair – while many people see a class society where rich people give their kids a massive edge in life, the reality is that people succeed largely on their merits.

Stage 2 (1980s-1990s): Previous researchers underestimated the intergenerational income correlation by failing to correct for year-to-year fluctuations. The true correlation is much higher, about .4, showing that we live in an unfair class society.

Stage 3: (late 1990s – today): The intergenerational income correlation is indeed quite high. But twin and adoption studies show that most or all of this correlation stems from heredity. The reason why kids from rich families do well isn’t that mom and dad buy their way through life. The reason, rather, is that rich families have genes that cause financial success, and pass these genes on to their kids. (Casual consumers of this literature often get confused by the fact that the effect of IQ is far too small to explain the intergenerational income correlation. The key thing to remember is that there is a lot more to genetics and success than IQ).

Notice: In Stage 1 and Stage 2 , the normative subtext was quite clear. Capitalism is pretty fair! No, it’s not! On my reading, though, most researchers have moved from Stage 2 to Stage 3 without noticing that their normative subtext is more pro-capitalist than Stage 1 even imagined.

But if the science doesn’t support the Narrative, is it even “the science?”

OPEN THREAD: Party like it’s Saturday night.

ONE DAY WE’LL HAVE HELIUM-3 RECOVERY STATIONS IN CLOSE ORBIT AROUND THE SUN: The sun just leaked a huge amount of helium-3 — the rare isotope scientists want to harvest on the moon.

SHOW THEM THEY’RE OUTNUMBERED:

Look at what happened when terror supporters tried to have a protest at Ole Miss.

American patriots will never be intimidated.

pic.twitter.com/baPQIDs5N5

— Eyal Yakoby (@EYakoby) April 11, 2025

IT RUINS EVERYTHING IT TOUCHES: How DEI Left Service Academies In A ‘State Of Decay,’ And How Trump Can Fix It.

WHERE WE ARE:

I think the establishment is stupid enough to throw all the rules out the window to get Trump and then will be stunned to find that it has no rules left to protect itself https://t.co/C7AWlt05EV

— Kurt Schlichter (@KurtSchlichter) April 12, 2025

JOSEPH BOTTUM: College Students Don’t Read. But Can They? With the new literature course I’m teaching at the University of Colorado, I’m aiming to find out.

In 1941, W.H. Auden listed nearly 6,000 pages of required reading for an undergraduate course at the University of Michigan. In 2018, the historian Wilfred McClay tried recreating that course at Hillsdale College. It quickly became one of the school’s most popular classes, wildly oversubscribed. The undergraduates even printed up T-shirts that read, “I Survived the Auden Course!”

Perhaps that’s proof that students rise to the level of expectations. If universities demand reading, they will get it. But such fire-hose courses as Auden’s demonstrate something more. College graduates used to have stories of the trenches they loved to tell—stories about the backbreaking organic-chemistry course that decided medical-school admissions. The required engineering course on dynamics. The ridiculous French literature survey course that demanded studying everything from “Song of Roland” to “The Stranger.”

The experiment this fall at the University of Colorado will be to learn whether students respond with that kind of camaraderie and the grumbling pride of having to do strenuous intellectual work. This isn’t the end of reading but the beginning—giving students a frame into which they can place the books they go on to read as adults, because the art form of the novel matters, profoundly shaping modern civilization. The test will be to see whether students can read, even if thus far they don’t.

Stay tuned.

ZOOM: Tested: 2025 Audi RS7 Performance Absolutely Lives Up to Its Name.

Even quicker than the one I reviewed a decade ago.

GOOD: CDC Staff Cuts Alarm Anti-Gun Advocates.

SKYNET SPEAKS: Conversation catalysts: Study shows English-speaking robots can enhance parent-child dialogue.

PROGRESS: Nuclear fuel reaches new enrichment standard. “For the first time, nuclear fuel enriched above 5% will be irradiated in a commercial U.S. reactor, the Department of Energy announced Thursday.”

SKYNET SMILES, ROLLS OVER, LIGHTS A CIGARETTE: First baby born from robot-controlled IVF in clinical trial.

WHAT POLICING LOOKS LIKE IN BRITAIN THESE DAYS:

A retired detective tried to expose the Pakistani child rape gangs. He was told to stop by senior police, because the 'right wing backlash' would destroy the city.

The POLICE admit they knowingly sacrificed young girls to Pakistani paedophiles to prevent the truth coming out. https://t.co/qm7rU30Jf2

— James Price (@jamespriceglos) April 11, 2025

CHANGE: Matt Taibbi: Burn it all Down. Globalization, once hailed as a panacea, has proven to be fundamentally corrupt and needs to be blown to kingdom come. “Everyone who follows this site knows I’ve always had an uncomfortable relationship with the Trump phenomenon. At the best of times, I find him puzzling and maybe dangerous, even when he’s being funny or taking aim at deserving targets. Now he’s president and people seem reflexively to want more criticism of him, but on this issue, what choice is there? The global economy created by both parties from the eighties onward was not only designed to be a giant predatory clusterfuck, but nearly impossible to unwind. Forget ‘incrementally,’ it’s got to be exploded. Would more of the same and a slow death be better?”

Some things can’t be done incrementally.