TIMOTHEE CHALAMET: “I hear Timmy’s speech as part of the new masculine pride, which I associate with Trump and those in his vicinity, which is not Hollywood. But it belongs in Hollywood, and Timmy’s a good exemplar of hard work and aspiration to greatness. It’s okay again — isn’t it? — to strive to achieve.”

The new masculine pride. Dare to be great!

YES. Radical Transparency Is the Key to Trump’s Early Success.

GIVING THE PRESS THE RESPECT IT DESERVES:

Low IQ reporter: "Why did you select an underqualified retired lieutenant general to be the next Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff?"

Pete Hegseth: "I'm going to choose to reject your unqualified question. Who's next?"

MIC DROP 🫳🏻🎤🔥
pic.twitter.com/LaBv5g7XfO

— Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) February 24, 2025

THIS IS BASICALLY LIKE THE LIGHT “PUMP SETS” THAT BODYBUILDERS DO AT THE END OF AN EXERCISE: Simple Technique Is The ‘Sweet Spot’ to Boost Recovery After Exercise.

PRETTY MUCH:

The despair you’re seeing from the communists is because their religion is coming apart. Imagine watching barbarians dismantle your church.

That’s how communists feel watching the taxpayer gravy train come to an end.

Ignore the Hall Monitor Right.

Keep going. More. Faster.

— Jesse Kelly (@JesseKellyDC) February 24, 2025

COMING SOON: RUNAWAY MANMADE GLOBAL COOLING. Game-Changing Method Turns Carbon Dioxide Into Usable Energy With Incredible Efficiency. I remember Ralph Merkle postulating a cloud of solar powered nanobots that would float in the upper atmosphere and separate carbon dioxide into its component atoms. The combination of high-altitude soot blocking the sun (from the carbon) and the loss of greenhouse effect would produce a new ice age. He wasn’t terribly happy when I named it the “Merkle Cloud.”

WELL, RICHARD REEVES WRITES FOR AN AUDIENCE OF WOMEN.

.@RichardvReeves says conservatives explicitly blame women for the problems men are facing & say “we have to go back”

Notably, @JDVance said none of that when he spoke last week @CPAC about the problems young men face https://t.co/n1VTt43G1Q pic.twitter.com/U48cR361eL

— Marc Caputo (@MarcACaputo) February 24, 2025

ORBITAL DYNAMICS: Oort cloud resembles a galaxy, new study finds. “A shell of icy objects at the edge of the solar system known as the Oort cloud has a pair of spiral arms that resemble a miniature galaxy, new research suggests. Until now, the shape of the cloud and how it is affected by forces beyond our solar system have not been largely understood.”

PART OF ME WANTS TO WANT A G-WAGON, BUT I JUST DON’T: Mercedes-Benz Confirms “Baby” G-Wagen, We Imagine An Adorable Off-Roader.

I’m also not yearning for an electric SUV.

PRIVACY RIGHTS UPDATE: Bill Prohibits Tennessee Doctors From Asking Patients About Gun Ownership.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: Do LED masks work? What the science says. Medical light therapy got its start at NASA.

SKYNET CRINGES AT THIS DESCRIPTION, WHICH IS TOO CREEPY EVEN FOR SKYNET: Robot with 1,000 muscles twitches like human while dangling from ceiling.

WELL, YES: Opinion: America is sick. Healthier food can help patients in recovery.

IS THERE ANYTHING THESE DRUGS CAN’T DO? Cocaine user experiences reduced withdrawal cravings with GLP-1 therapy, case study reports. We’ll see if that pans out.

CHANGE: Kansas lawmakers override veto of ban on gender-affirming care for kids.

YES: “If your state took longer to report their votes than all of Germany did to report its on Sunday, don’t get upset if people call into question the fidelity and accuracy of your elections, if not the validity of the results.”

LOL, FOLLOW THE “SCIENCE:” UCLA study: Whites’ ‘anti-democratic’ attitudes linked to racism against minorities.

CHANGE: Dept. of Ed stops more than $600 million from funding CRT, DEI, other ‘divisive ideologies.’

CDR SALAMANDER: The German Elections: Take the Win.

ICYMI: MY LATEST SUBSTACK ESSAY: Let’s Go Privateering! An old idea gets new enthusiasm.

Plus Grok Image Generator’s delightful idea of what a modern privateer might look like.

YES:

“They are profoundly aware that they MUST act fast and with some degree of ferocity, even recklessness, else we will default back to the status quo of leaders who pretend to be in charge while the embedded system runs things behind the scenes.” All of this👇👇 https://t.co/D6IAg56aRQ

— Randy Barnett (@RandyEBarnett) February 23, 2025

RCP AVERAGE: “Right Track” numbers surge upward.

CHANGE: ABA Legal Ed Council Suspends Diversity Accreditation Standard In Wake Of Trump Executive Order And DOE Letter.

MEGAN MCARDLE: Academia Finally Got Schooled: Universities, colleges took prestige and public support for granted. Now they are paying the price.

The left, not the right, picked this fight. Too many institutions set themselves up as the “Resistance” to Trump and tried to make a lot of mainstream political opinions anathematic, while expecting to be protected from backlash by principles such as academic freedom that they were no longer honoring. This was politically naive and criminally stupid for institutions that rely so heavily on U.S. taxpayer support. . . .

By presenting their expertise as part of a political fight, academics were not only squandering their credibility. They were asking to be treated like political adversaries. And in a real political fight, the ability to get your opponent’s journal article retracted is way less important than his ability to cut off your supply lines.

This danger has been evident for years, yet when I asked academics if this was really wise, most were curiously oblivious to the risks. Though they complained about stingy state legislatures and meddling Republican politicians, many bizarrely took them as evidence that there was little cost to politicizing academia — essentially, “They’re already attacking us, so there’s no point in trying to placate them.” They did not seem to grasp how much worse it could get.

Fundamentally, they took their prestige and public support for granted and seemed unable to imagine a world where the word “education” no longer conjured reverent deference among most of the population. Like children throwing rocks from an overpass, they felt protected by their elevated position, assuming their targets could do little but yell back. They weren’t expecting one of the drivers to get out of the car and grab a baseball bat from the trunk.

It’s not like they weren’t warned.

Plus: “The institutional left can’t control what Republicans do. It can only control its own behavior. And that behavior, however well-intentioned, was reckless in the extreme.” I’m not convinced that the behavior was at all well-intentioned, but sure.

ANDY KESSLER: The You-Do Economy: Self-service may seem inconvenient, but it’s a new frontier of individualism.

Inside View: Columnist Andy Kessler speculates on issues including earnings at Apple, AI at Google, weight loss drugs including Ozempic, the rise of the humanoid robots like Tesla’s Optimus, and arguably the biggest question of all: Is Snoop Dogg overexposed? Photo: Cfoto/Zuma Press/Chris Pizzello/AP

It started slowly. We dial our own phone numbers instead of an operator. We pump our own gasoline (except in New Jersey). With pensions phasing out, most of us plan for our own retirement and trade our own stocks. I call it the You Do Economy.

Technology, which eats people, replacing low-end jobs, has turned this trend into a runaway train. We use self-checkout lines at grocery stores. Airlines prefer if we check in ourselves and either show or print our own boarding passes. Airline kiosks spit out baggage tags that often take a doctorate to figure out how to attach. Hotels want us to check in and out ourselves (though I always forget to print out the bill so I can expense it). Need customer service? Forget it. Read the FAQ. Or go watch a video on YouTube. Else we’re on hold for 45 minutes, minimum.

We are almost forced to buy clothes and shoes online. Physical stores don’t stock the quantity or variety of Amazon and other sellers. Then, of course, we have to haul ourselves to Whole Foods, Staples or UPS with our returns—lugging with us five boxes of uncomfortable sneakers.

We swipe our own credit card to pay—cash is almost dead. Even worse, restaurants don’t bother with menus (remember when Covid spread via paper?). Instead, we scan QR codes and squint at menus on our phones. We’re asked to tip at counter-service restaurants.

Is that it? Heck no. People used to rely on editors to fact-check or amend the record. Now on X and most recently Facebook, we get “community notes,” which are corrections done by, you guessed it, you and me! Artificial intelligence could do the fact checking, but, no, it hallucinates so bad we’re forced to question everything it comes up with.

We have to install our own updates, and we’re even subject to buggy beta software, so we have to find all the problems instead of quality-assurance teams doing the job. We install a dozen streaming services instead of the old cable feed. Changing shows means almost acrobatic precision presses on our remote.

We do our own taxes, even though the Internal Revenue Service has virtually all our financial information already. We need to be our own health advocates. All this takes more time, and time is money. It’s unpaid work for all of us.

If we abolished the Income Tax, or replaced it with a flat tax or the Fair Tax, that would help with the tax issue. As for the other stuff, some of it brings more choice, but some of it is just a way of exporting costs to customers.