Merz: "Ukraine has been defending its freedom for more than 4 years." (AfD members laughing) Merz: "That’s telling sign, ladies and gentlemen. They laugh about it, they laugh about fate of millions of people in Ukraine and they travel to Moscow for their champagne receptions."

This is such an important paper. Ryan McEntush, Sam D'Amico, and Packy McCormick have been screaming about this for a year or more. It's important!!!

This all started w/ taunts of “Canada will be the 51st state” & “their Prime Minister will be the 51st governor.” The insults gained us nothing but animosity that cost us economically & now militarily. Cooler & wiser brains are needed to preserve a close alliance w/ our neighbor.

“NATO WASN’T THERE WHEN WE NEEDED THEM, AND THEY WON’T BE THERE IF WE NEED THEM AGAIN. REMEMBER GREENLAND, THAT BIG, POORLY RUN, PIECE OF ICE!!!” - President Donald J. Trump

Read The Story of Civilization by Durant

Vance blames all Hungary's economic problems on foreign interference (Brussels and Zelensky, not Orban's 16 year looting binge).

NATO members are obliged to support one another if attacked, not to join wars of choice. That stipulation was made at the demand of the US, which also insisted that the commitment be territorially limited. “The treaty does not cover the entire world,” said Dean Acheson. “It applies only to the North Atlantic area.” He made clear that this had been the key American condition. “We deliberately avoided any implication that we were undertaking a global military commitment.” The Senate, worried about being dragged into European colonial wars, had threatened to refuse ratification unless the limitations were explicit. As John Foster Dulles put it: “If it were made global in scope, it would not be acceptable to the United States.” Despite all this, the only time that NATO has gone to war was indeed out of area, at the request of the US after 9/11.

It’s not every day that one gets to listen to a former British Prime Minister recite from memory the opening passages of The Iliad in Ancient Greek, with no notes, in response to a random question from an undergraduate—and all while wearing what appear to be Thomas The Tank Engine socks. But today was one such day. My thanks to my good friend Brad LaMorgese for the opportunity to see the colorful and comic Boris Johnson speak tonight at the University of Dallas.

Like an appreciation of progress, reading and literacy are among the things that are good but cognitively unnatural. That is, they go against our evolved nature. We didn’t evolve with print; it was a recent invention. Reading, for many of us, has become so second nature that we just assume it’s the most natural way of getting information. But what we’ve seen, especially in the last 10 years, when video has become so cheap because of the cloud computing revolution and the broadband revolution, is that a lot of people, unlike us, much prefer to listen and watch than to read. You just see this: when I go to Google and ask a basic question about how to unstick my printer or solve a problem, I get like five videos. And I just want a paragraph that would solve it. I don’t want to see Seth saying, “Hi, welcome to my show. If you like it, subscribe and give it a like.” So just help me solve the problem. But clearly there’s something unusual about me, because people are going for the video. And the massive availability of video—of TikTok, of YouTube—means that people may not be getting the practice or putting in the effort into literacy, which we have reason to believe was one of the drivers of the Flynn effect and of cognitive sophistication in general. @HumanProgress

Like an appreciation of progress, reading and literacy are among the things that are good but cognitively unnatural. That is, they go against our evolved nature. We didn’t evolve with print; it was a recent invention. Reading, for many of us, has become so second nature that we just assume it’s the most natural way of getting information. But what we’ve seen, especially in the last 10 years, when video has become so cheap because of the cloud computing revolution and the broadband revolution, is that a lot of people, unlike us, much prefer to listen and watch than to read. You just see this: when I go to Google and ask a basic question about how to unstick my printer or solve a problem, I get like five videos. And I just want a paragraph that would solve it. I don’t want to see Seth saying, “Hi, welcome to my show. If you like it, subscribe and give it a like.” So just help me solve the problem. But clearly there’s something unusual about me, because people are going for the video. And the massive availability of video—of TikTok, of YouTube—means that people may not be getting the practice or putting in the effort into literacy, which we have reason to believe was one of the drivers of the Flynn effect and of cognitive sophistication in general. @HumanProgress

Trump’s former Defense Secretary Jim Mattis: “America is becoming predatory. America is unreliable. There’s a sense that we are not a reliable security partner right now…you can’t bring allies on board if they don’t trust you”

Hegseth asked about Russia helping Iran to target Americans: "We're not concerned about that... The only ones that need to be worried right now are Iranians that think they're going to live." A grotesquely indiscriminate threat against the entire Iranian population.