One of, if not the greatest luxuries in life...

If I had Musk's trillion, I'd actually spend it on something useful, like developing reusable rockets to make space travel cheap instead of just hoarding it all.

It’s 2026 and there are still people out there who think Bitcoin isn’t scarce or valuable because you can make another Bitcoin if you wanted to These people don’t understand how networks form Go ahead and make 50 more Bitcoin networks and then watch how no one participates in any of them It would be like making another Internet; Completely worthless

I am just waiting for your "Don't make the mistake" tweet. Then we will know the low is in.

Should we let you live even though you’re retarded?

No one in my family suffers from my little sister-in-law Valentina’s existence — including Valentina herself. And for the record, she had heart and ear surgery. That does not make her unworthy of life. I’ll be praying for the little soul of the child you killed.

In a few months profits will temporarily flow out of TradFi (cool off phase after IPOs). People will want to know where to put their money because everything already went up so much. And there Bitcoin will be, ready to begin the next four year cycle.

On Trinity Sunday, Chesterton reminds us that, even if all you believe about religion is that "God is love," you implicitly believe in the Trinity.

I can stay retarded longer than the Bitcoin price can stay gay.

resurrecting this after Pope Leo’s encyclical 😂

I am so glad that you asked this question. This is one of my favorite things to witness. So, I was away from the church for about 20 years, and that is a lot of sin to atone for. Fornication, leading others astray, denying the Holy Spirit, committing blasphemies. Heck, at one point I even desecrated a Bible and uploaded it to YouTube. So what I wound up doing was taking one of those examination of conscience booklets, and after doing the suggested meditations and prayers, I put a little X next to every sin that I could recall committing — and this thing looked like a grocery list by the end. So I contacted the local priest and explained my situation — that I was returning to the Catholic Church after being away for such a long time, and that I would appreciate having a private confession period. And so Father John, my priest, arranged to open the confessional to hear my private confession one day during the week. Obviously, I was really nervous. I hadn't been to confession in nearly two decades, and I scarcely even remembered how to do it. So, I am very glad that I had that examination of conscience booklet that gave me explicit instructions on how to do it. So I went into the confessional, got on my knees, and said, "Bless me, Father, for I have sinned; it's been nearly 20 years since my last confession." Then I just rattled off the list. After I was done, I was of course very nervous. What was this man going to say? And how many hours of community service was I going to have to do in order to make up for all the debauchery in my life? He said to me, "That was a very good confession...." and then told me of God's love and mercy, and how through Christ's sacrifice on the cross I am washed of my sins... And then he said, "For your penance, I would like you to attend Mass tomorrow and receive the Eucharist." I think you referred to it as Penitential Communion. And then he told me, "Welcome back" and "Go in Christ's peace." Obviously, that had a lasting effect on me — and I will spend the rest of my life trying to become worthy of that mercy. I know I can't get there alone, but through the grace of God and the body of Christ. And that's it.

I’d rather watch Bitcoin go to ZERO than spend my life chained to a broken fiat system. Not a DAMN thing will shake me out of my position. And I know I’m not alone.

You start reading weird books. You buy “The Bitcoin Standard” and then “The Fiat Standard” and then you accidentally end up reading Murray Rothbard, and then somehow you’re reading Mises, and then it’s 11:47 PM on a Tuesday and you’re 340 pages into “Human Action” and you’re highlighting passages about praxeology and your wife comes downstairs and asks if you’re coming to bed and you say “in a minute” but you don’t come to bed for two hours because you have just discovered that everything you were taught about economics in college was wrong, all of it, every single sentence, and now you can’t go back, you can never go back, you have been orange-pilled in a way that goes deeper than money, you have been epistemologically orange-pilled, you now believe that John Maynard Keynes was a charlatan and the gold standard was actually fine and the income tax is theft and you can never say any of this out loud at a dinner party ever again.

Attempted to write a Steam Engine hype at the era of Industrial Revolution as if it was the age of AI — The steam engine breakthrough is insane right now. Watt’s separate condenser new GRPO optimization just dropped the 405 hp-class engine. We went from 7 hp → 70 hp → 405 hp in basically three years. One machine now does the work of 50 men or water wheels — nonstop, rain or shine, anywhere. Textile mills, ironworks, everything scaling 5-10x overnight. Productivity exploding. This isn’t incremental. It’s automating physical labor at massive scale. Jobs shifting forever. Society about to look unrecognizable. The Industrial Revolution isn’t coming. It’s here and accelerating faster than anyone predicted. Terrified. Excited. Both. What a time to be alive. 🚂💨

😭😭

Reality will hit us all. Be fruitful and multiply.

Taxing inflation as if it’s profit is one of the quiet scams in the code. If your dollars are worth less and your asset only “went up” because the measuring stick collapsed, that’s not a real gain. That’s just the government taxing the smoke after it set the fire.

Je veux présenter mes excuses, au nom des Français, pour avoir enfanté la French Theory (qui a enfanté la pire des merdes idéologiques : le wokisme). Nous avons donné au monde Descartes, Pascal, Tocqueville. Et puis, dans les ruines intellectuelles de l'après-68, nous avons donné Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze. Trois hommes brillants qui ont fabriqué, dans l'élégance de notre langue, l'arme idéologique qui paralyse aujourd'hui l'Occident. Il faut comprendre ce qu'ils ont fait. Foucault a enseigné que la vérité n'existe pas, qu'il n'y a que des rapports de pouvoir déguisés en savoir. Que la science, la raison, la justice, l'institution médicale, l'école, la prison, la sexualité, tout n'est qu'une mise en scène de la domination. Derrida a enseigné que les textes n'ont pas de sens stable, que tout signifiant glisse, que toute lecture est une trahison, que l'auteur est mort et que le lecteur règne. Deleuze a enseigné qu'il fallait préférer le rhizome à l'arbre, le nomade au sédentaire, le désir à la loi, le devenir à l'être, la différence à l'identité. Pris isolément, ce sont des thèses discutables. Combinées, exportées, vulgarisées, elles forment un système. Et ce système est un poison. Car voici ce qui s'est passé. Ces textes, illisibles en France, ont traversé l'Atlantique. Les départements de Yale, de Berkeley, de Columbia les ont absorbés dans les années 80. Ils y ont trouvé un terreau qui n'existait pas chez nous : le puritanisme américain, sa culpabilité raciale, son obsession identitaire. La French Theory s'est mariée à ce substrat, et l'enfant de ce mariage s'appelle le wokisme. Judith Butler lit Foucault et invente le genre performatif. Edward Said lit Foucault et invente le post-colonialisme académique. Kimberlé Crenshaw hérite du cadre et invente l'intersectionnalité. À chaque étape, la matrice est française : il n'y a pas de vérité, il n'y a que du pouvoir, donc toute hiérarchie est suspecte, toute institution est oppressive, toute norme est violence, toute identité est construite donc négociable, toute majorité est coupable. Voilà comment trois philosophes parisiens, qui n'ont probablement jamais imaginé leurs conséquences pratiques, ont fourni le logiciel d'exploitation à une génération entière d'activistes, de bureaucrates universitaires, de DRH, de journalistes, de législateurs. Voilà comment on a obtenu une civilisation qui ne sait plus dire si une femme est une femme, si sa propre histoire mérite d'être défendue, si le mérite existe, si la vérité se distingue de l'opinion. C'est de la merde pour une raison simple, et il faut la dire calmement. Une civilisation se tient debout sur trois piliers : la croyance qu'il existe une vérité accessible à la raison, la croyance qu'il existe un bien distinct du mal, la croyance qu'il existe un héritage à transmettre. La French Theory a entrepris de dynamiter les trois. Pas par méchanceté. Par jeu intellectuel, par fascination du soupçon, par haine de la bourgeoisie qui les avait nourris. Mais le résultat est là. Une génération entière a appris à déconstruire et n'a jamais appris à construire. Une génération entière sait soupçonner et ne sait plus admirer. Une génération entière voit le pouvoir partout et la beauté nulle part. Je m'excuse parce que nous, Français, avons une responsabilité particulière. C'est notre langue, nos universités, nos éditeurs, notre prestige qui ont donné à ce nihilisme son emballage chic. Sans la légitimité de la Sorbonne et de Vincennes, ces idées n'auraient jamais traversé l'océan. Nous avons exporté le doute comme d'autres exportent des armes. Ce qui se construit maintenant, en silicon valley, dans les labos d'IA, dans les startups, dans les ateliers, dans tous les lieux où des gens fabriquent encore des choses au lieu de les déconstruire, c'est la réponse. Une civilisation se reconstruit par les bâtisseurs, pas par les commentateurs. Par ceux qui croient que la vérité existe et qu'elle vaut qu'on s'y consacre. Par ceux qui assument une hiérarchie du beau, du vrai, du bon, et qui n'ont pas honte de la transmettre. Alors pardon. Et au travail.

Why does Mary look younger than Jesus in Michelangelo's Pietà? The answer is one of the most beautiful in art history... Mary is holding the body of her 33 year old son, but she looks 20. Critics noticed it the moment the sculpture was unveiled in 1499. The mother of a man who has just been crucified would have been in her late forties or early fifties. Michelangelo had carved her as a girl. His own biographer, Ascanio Condivi, was the one who finally asked him why. The answer Michelangelo gave is preserved in Condivi's Life of Michelangelo and has been repeated for centuries: "Do you not know that chaste women stay fresh much more than those who are not chaste? How much more in the case of the Virgin, who had never experienced the least lascivious desire that might change her body?" Most modern critics treat this answer as a half-serious deflection. Michelangelo was famous for his sharp tongue and refused to explain himself to people he considered beneath his intellect. The deeper answer is older, and it lies inside one of the greatest poems ever written. In the final canto of Dante's Paradiso, Saint Bernard of Clairvaux begins his prayer to the Virgin with one of the most extraordinary lines in Italian literature: "Vergine madre, figlia del tuo figlio." "Virgin mother, daughter of your own son." Michelangelo, who knew Dante by heart, was carving that line into stone. Mary is younger than Jesus because Jesus is older than the universe... because she gave birth to her own creator. But there is another reading, simpler than either of those, and it is the one I find myself thinking of today. Every mother who has held her child has held them at every age at once. The infant is still inside the toddler. The toddler is still inside the teenager. The young man on her lap, even dead, is also the boy she nursed and the baby she first carried home. And maybe that's why Michelangelo did not carve Mary as the years had aged her. He carved her as love had kept her: outside of time, outside of grief, holding her son the way she had always held him... Happy Mother's Day. -- -- -- If you enjoyed this, I write a weekly newsletter read by over 50,000 people who love rediscovering the beauty of the past. You can join us here: James-lucas.com/welcome I write about beauty in all its forms. If you'd like to support my work, a paid subscription is what makes it possible.

One of the most important points of my reversion process was when a priest looked me straight in the eye and yelled: "You'll go to hell, do you understand? If you die now, you're absolutely going to hell!" I was a cafeteria Catholic and no priest had ever talked to me like that before. I was stunned. Even a bit angry. How dare he? But his words echoed in my head and I could not focus on anything else. The conviction in his voice was the scariest and most sobering thing I had ever experienced. I went to confession that week after years of visiting the church only occasionally. It may at times be necessary to speak with caution when talking to those who are overly scrupulous. But most people would benefit greatly by having a priest occasionally shout at them: "You're going to hell if you continue!" In your charity, please say an Ave for this wonderful priest. He became the hospital chaplain in my town and is very busy now.