At the start of the twentieth century, American consumers were still living in what today’s greens would consider a state of grace. They carried their own baskets and cotton bags to the grocery store and brought home food wrapped in biodegradable paper. They didn’t use disposable towels in public bathrooms, which provided cloth towels attached to rollers. There were no Styrofoam cups for coffee and no plastic bottles of water. When people wanted water in a public place, they’d get it from the spigot of a drinking fountain by filling a tin cup chained to the fountain.
This “common cup” was the ultimate reusable product — much to the horror of public-health experts, who blamed it for spreading tuberculosis, pneumonia, diphtheria, meningitis, and other diseases. Alvin Davison, a biologist at Lafayette College in Pennsylvania, analyzed cups from public schools and reported in 1908 that a single sip from a student left a residue of 100 dead skin cells and 75,000 bacteria. He used the scrapings from one school cup to induce fatal cases of pneumonia and tuberculosis in guinea pigs.
His article “Death in School Drinking Cups” provided support to “Ban the Cup” campaigns around the country. The first successful one was led in Kansas by Samuel Crumbine, a colorful doctor who had started his career in Dodge City (he was the model for Doc Adams in the long-running Gunsmoke television series) and went on to lead various public-hygiene crusades. The term “flyswatter” comes from a slogan he popularized, “Swat the fly” (which came to him while listening to the crowd at a baseball game urging a hitter to swat a sacrifice fly ball). After watching train passengers with tuberculosis and other diseases drinking water from a common cup, Crumbine got so upset that he threw the cup out the train’s window, and proceeded to persuade his colleagues on the state board of health to ban the common cup in trains, schools, and other public places in Kansas in 1909.
The ban left Kansans with a new problem: What were they supposed to use at a public fountain? Fortunately, as Crumbine later recalled, “Necessity proved to be the mother of invention.” Shortly after banning the cup, Crumbine was visited by a former Kansan named Hugh Moore, who brought with him samples of a product that his brother-in-law had invented: round paper cups that could be stacked in a dispenser next to a fountain. Crumbine’s endorsement provided crucial help to Moore in selling his product, originally called Health Kups and later renamed Dixie Cups.
John Tierney, “Let’s Hold On to the Throwaway Society”, City Journal, 2020-09-13.
June 8, 2026
QotD: Re-use, recycle, and contaminate
June 7, 2026
Morality and humour
Devon Eriksen suggests that there’s a correlation between a person’s morality and their sense of humour (or lack thereof):
There is probably a correlation between morality and sense of humor.
Larry Niven once theorized that humor is associated with an interrupted defense mechanism.
The idea is that you have a situation presented to you which would normally trigger a defensive response, but when you realize it is actually harmless, the response that you experience as laughter or amusement is your brain’s way of derailing that inappropriate defense mechanism.
Because it isn’t appropriate to fight or run away from harmless things.
This mechanism become easy to see when you look at very simple or developing senses of humor. To a baby, unexpected + safe = comedy gold.
And my cat Dante’s favorite joke is “I BITE your toes! … but actually, I don’t bite them! I just lick them by surprise, watch you jump, then run away mewing and looking pleased with myself!”
Humor can become quite sophisticated, but I’ve never yet seen anything funny that couldn’t be understood this way.
But there’s a certain type of evil person who is evil precisely because they don’t interrupt defense mechanisms.
They fight harmless things. Even beneficial ones. And they give you long lectures about how the harmless or even the wonderful thing is ackshually super-problematic.
This is the visible symptom of a form of neurotic hypervigilance which can, and often does, progress to the point of simply lashing out, figuratively or even literally, at random parts of the environment, because the brain has constructed some narrative whereby it’s a threat.
The humor response is our natural way of not doing this.
June 6, 2026
Lies “in a good cause” are still frickin’ lies
This was posted in late May, but only came to my attention today, so apologies if you’ve already waded through the details here:
The problem with this meme is … well, just read the article.
This meme keeps entering my feed and it bugs me every time I see it. For search engines and the visually impaired: it shows, on the left, a large McDonald’s French fry priced at $1.99. On the right, it shows a delectable fruit cup, including mixed berries, cubed melon, and prominent slices of starfruit priced at $5.99. The caption above both declares, “The Problem With Our Food System”.
Invariably, this meme is met with earnest rejoinders, often in thread 🧵 form, explaining the complexities of food distribution. One particularly clever one that I just saw introduces the concept of “Malicious Design” as a sort of secular creationism where the limitations imposed by nature are imagined as human systems intentionally engineered to harm the masses. Threads like these usually go on to describe how potatoes are cheap, hardy, and practically preserve themselves, while berries are delicate, seasonal, and expensive to ship. They argue that the price difference is simply the natural consequence of supply chains, not the machinations of a capitalist oligarchy trying to keep the proletariat down.
All of that might be true.
But it doesn’t matter.
Because the entire discussion rests on a premise that is demonstrably false.
Not the stuff about potatoes or berries or supply chains. Not even the stuff about the oligarchs insofar as, if they are trying to poison us, they are doing a middling job at best. The problem is that everyone accepts the meme’s starting point as if it were genuine. They never check the most basic fact: the prices themselves!!!
Let’s start with the French fries, because they are on the left and because I have the McDonald’s app on my phone. I can tell you without looking that $1.99 is the wrong price for a large fry because I am a fast-food proletarian myself.
Behold: in my market — Omaha — the price is $4.39. According to the Interwebs, this is a pretty representative price nationwide outside of larger cities. The reason we are considering a large fry instead of a small, which still comes in at a whopping $3.99, is because the meme uses a picture of a large.
Already, the price of the fruit cup and the French fries are much more comparable. Ah, but those crafty capitalists know that the stupid masses will steer toward the cheaper option, regardless of the health risks, even if it is only to save a penny. That’s how the fast-food-to-pharma pipeline gets you! By tricking you into passing on the much healthier and obviously more delicious fruit cup. (Never mind last week’s newsletter about all the poisonous chemicals they’re spraying on the fruit.)
So, I will check on the fruit cup now. The first wrinkle is that the image of the fruit cup does not come from the McDonald’s app. That’s because McDonald’s doesn’t sell a fruit cup in most — if any — markets. If they did, it would arrive to the store frozen and the kid who was supposed to move it from the freezer to the refrigerator last night will have forgotten to do so, meaning that what you will receive is a cup of brightly colored ice cubes that you can pretend to enjoy in a couple of hours. (source: 5+ years personally serving in the McTrenches coinciding with the deployment of the Fruit ‘n Yogurt Parfait™.) In other word, you will not see these two items side-by-side on the menu.
And this is where it gets tricky. Because I can’t actually find that particular fruit cup. Reverse image search turns up a big fat nada. Not on any fast food site, online grocery store, stock photo outlet, food blog, or news page.
Read the whole thing, I believe is the term d’art for this. H/T to Kim du Toit for the link.
June 5, 2026
The Lord of the Flies was just a novel
We often use The Lord of the Flies as a shorthand way to illustrate the darkness in the hearts of men, and that, absent civilizations, men descend into a hellscape of violence, hatred, and all-against-all destructive competition. Yet the real-life case of a group of boys isolated for an extended time didn’t go at all the way the novel did:
More and more I’m learning that the nihilistic claptrap we were all told was genius was just Leftist demoralization propaganda.
Situations like this have occurred, and the children didn’t turn into little monsters. In fact they survived quite well.
In June 1965, six boys named, aged 13 to 16 “borrowed” a fisherman’s boat hoping to reach Fiji or New Zealand. After a storm damaged the sail and rudder, they drifted for eight days surviving on fish and rainwater collected in coconut shells, before washing up on the rocky uninhabited island of ‘Ata.
Rather than descending into chaos during their months there the boys created a mini society. They planted vegetables, collected and stored rainwater, and maintained a permanent fire. They even built a gymnasium with homemade weights, a badminton court, and chicken pens.
They divided daily chores using rosters, resolved conflicts with time-outs instead of fighting, began and ended each day with songs and prayers. One boy, Gilligan’s Isle style, constructed a guitar from driftwood and coconut shell to boost morale. When one of the children broke his leg falling off a cliff the others set it with sticks and leaves and took over his work. They ate fish, coconuts, eggs, wild taro, bananas, and later chickens they had discovered in an ancient volcanic crater.
They endured this for for fifteen months, and never once turned into murderous thugs. A far cry from what we were told would happen.
It wasn’t just William Golding manufacturing dark stories, of course:
QotD: Modern men and the need for male spaces
Internet men believe that some kind of man-space is essential. A place for men to be men, mentor other men, and tell younger men the secret wisdom to get their lives on track. That if only we had these spaces, everything would be great for men because we’d all know the secret wisdom that doesn’t actually exist.
Internet women believe that male spaces are dens of misogyny. Places where trollish men want to gather, away from the eyes and ears of right-thinking people, so they can poison other men with hate and bigotry.
Which is silly. Men don’t hate women because other men told them to. They see women being women, and that does the trick just fine. In fact, if a man is getting hourly blowjobs from every woman whose path he crosses, then some group of troll men try to tell him women suck, he’d be confused at how uninformed these men are when women are clearly awesome.
Women’s behavior is the number-one driver of misogyny. Not men telling other men women suck.
And that’s the point of male spaces. Not secret manly-man wisdom, not chattering about woman-hate. A space where men can just be. Without women there.
Women are … a certain way.
This is especially true of middle-class and richer women, and even a little more true of white women than other kinds. But true of all women to some extent.
Women have this way about them — everything they do, say, everything about how they behave — that just subtly communicates that they do not have a lot of experience with consequences. That they are just not that used to considering consequences seriously before doing something.
I’m usually hesitant to use political buzz-words in a non-ironic way, but I think the term “privileged” is pretty perfect for this situation.
A woman’s reality — her experience — is a world where consequences just aren’t quite as big of a deal for her as they are for others. She’s never really had to consider consequences with quite the same intensity.
It’s important to note that this isn’t some kind of overt, intentional flaunting as women stride around, consequence-free, thumbing their noses at us. Women don’t even know this is a thing. They’ll deny it fiercely if you tell them. They don’t feel privileged, and their feelings are always real. They’ll even tell you that you’re the privileged one, not them. Because that feels right to them.
It’s not something they do on purpose, and it’s not even that frontal and pronounced. It’s very subtle. Just this subtle way that women are. When they talk, act, make decisions.
This makes them very irritating. Even women find each other irritating.
Archwinger, “Male spaces are because women are irritating”, Archwinger’s Substack, 2026-02-25.
May 30, 2026
“Bullying”
I was bullied as a kid. I hated it. Most kids experience it, and either hate it or embrace it as “how things are done” (most likely both). This is basic human nature across all cultures. It’s how we learn how to conform, or appear to conform, to cultural expectations. In a pre-urban environment, the community could only handle so many non-conformists — that is: close to zero — so nipping it in the bud with the children was a pro-survival/pro-communitarian mechanism. In modern urban environments, bullying still happens because it’s part of human nature rather than being how children learn how to cope with social situations.
We’ve even migrated the notion of suppressing “bullying” to the military, as InfantryDort explains:
Any man who thinks bullying is ubiquitously inappropriate has the survival instincts of a deer gazing longingly at headlights.
For most of human history, communities had weak formal institutions. Public ridicule, shaming, and ostracism were used to enforce norms.
Examples:
> Villages mocking chronic thieves.
> Military units humiliating cowards.
> Tradesmen ridiculing apprentices who refused to learn.The positive effect was often:
> Greater conformity to community standards.
> Faster correction of disruptive behavior.
> Stronger group cohesion.It hardens individuals to harsh environments when properly applied. And enforces societal norms we want and dissuades the ones we don’t.
The lack of bullying is how people grow up to adulthood and say things like “I’m gonna kill you and your whole family” at some political protest. And have it come out of their mouth as normal as breathing.
Because nobody ever stood them down in their formative years.
You’re a JAG. You think every problem has a legal solution. It doesn’t. You don’t understand the way the world works outside of the one the law has carefully curated for you. Made possible by people who’ve been using strength to coerce others for all of human history.
Let me spank the kids while you do the dishes.
May 26, 2026
Canadian parents are increasingly adopting the “helicopter” or “bulldozer” model
Eva Chipiuk on concerning trends in Canadian parenting styles and the long-term impact on children:
Not many people have really turned their minds to the psychology of Canadians. Most are too busy reacting to the latest outrage, headline, or political controversy.
However, David Redman has cautioned about what he has identified as a trend in Canada: “helicopter” and “bulldozer” parenting, where children are either constantly hovered over or where every obstacle is removed before they ever have to face it themselves.
Over time, that kind of environment can produce people who become uncomfortable with uncertainty, overly dependent on authority, fearful of risk, and hesitant to think independently or challenge difficult ideas. As this article put it:
Children, the authors observed, are now deliberately shielded from any sense of risk or uncertainty. How can anyone — young boys most of all — learn about the world around them when school principals announce at the onset of every snowfall that “all snow must stay on the ground”. The ideal of adventure and resilience has been replaced by a debilitating sense of fragility and risk-avoidance …
Adventure should properly be considered a spirit, not a place. It is driven by a powerful mixture of curiosity, necessity, and an openness to experiencing new things. And it can be found wherever uncertainty reigns. Today, that might entail travelling to strange lands, meeting new people, or even engaging in uncomfortable discussions about whether Alberta should remain part of Canada forever.
Wherever the unknown lies, adventure can be found.
That mindset does not just affect childhood. It shapes entire societies. It affects how citizens respond to disagreement, political debate, uncertainty, criticism, and even new ideas.
Somewhere along the way, many Canadians lost their sense of adventure, resilience, curiosity, and willingness to engage with uncomfortable conversations or difficult questions.
Where did that spirit go? What happened to the mindset that encouraged people to explore, question authority, take risks, debate ideas openly, and build something better even when the outcome was uncertain? Somewhere along the way, discomfort itself seems to have become something to avoid rather than something people grow through.
Because if we stop exploring, questioning, debating, and taking risks, we lose something essential about what it means to live freely and think independently. A society that becomes afraid of uncertainty eventually becomes dependent on being told what is safe, acceptable, and permitted.
If we are going to move forward in any meaningful way, we need to rediscover the spirit of curiosity, resilience, and adventure that pushes people to test ideas, challenge assumptions, and engage with the unknown instead of fearing it.
Perhaps one of the most important conversations we should be having is this: what does it actually mean to be Canadian today?
Because for many, it increasingly feels like the answer is becoming less about courage, resilience, curiosity, and self-determination, and more about compliance, comfort, and avoiding difficult conversations.
May 21, 2026
Explaining why more men are “opting out”
On Substack, Bettina Arndt shows some of the reasons why men are less and less willing to commit — not just to relationships, but to huge swathes of what we used to call “adult life”:
The warning signs have been there for decades. Back in 1983, American author Barbara Ehrenreich wrote a powerful book — The Hearts of Men: American Dreams and the Flight from Commitment — arguing that a male revolt was underway. Since the 1950s, she suggested, men had begun rebelling against the breadwinner ethic — inspired by Playboy culture, the counterculture, and a desire for personal freedom. They were rejecting the cultural ideology that had shamed them into tying the knot and becoming a good provider, lest they be seen as immature, irresponsible, and less than a real man.
Ehrenreich understood that marriage was the mechanism by which society harnessed male productivity. Remove the shame, and the yoke comes off.
Forty years on, the yoke has disappeared. In April 2026, the American male labour force participation rate hit its lowest level since records began in the 1940s, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. One in three American men — roughly 33% — were not working or actively looking for work. The overall male participation rate for men aged 16 and over stood at just 67%, down from 73.5% two decades ago and from 87% in the postwar years when Ehrenreich’s story begins.
The trend is not confined to America. Australian men’s workforce participation has fallen from around 79% in 1978 to approximately 71% today (see below), while similar declines — though less dramatic than in the United States — have occurred in the UK and Canada.
[…]
If you want to understand why men are voting with their feet, you need to look not just at what marriage now costs them — and the costs are severe — but at what it delivers. Increasingly, what it delivers is a pretty dud deal.
The modern woman: a prospectus.
- They are the most miserable, anxious, and insecure cohort in living memory — hardly great marriage material.
- Most married women go off sex — and the husband who objects is seen as the problem.
- Many women don’t actually like men very much. The more educated she is, the higher the contempt.
- They’ve gone full throttle left — and three quarters of college-educated women won’t even date a man who votes differently.
- They’ve rigged the education system and colonised corporate and institutional life, turning universities and workplaces into man-repellent factories.
- Yet their hypergamy (desire to marry up) is still running hot. Despite outnumbering men in education and careers, they demand a tall, equally high-status unicorn.
- The modern female threat-detection system is hyperactive. Almost any male behaviour — silence, opinions, jokes, breathing — gets flagged as a red flag.
- They’re extremely well-versed in the lucrative economics of divorce, including a well-timed false allegation to eliminate tedious shared parenting.
What rational man reads this list and thinks: yes, that’s exactly what’s been missing from my life?
May 20, 2026
Canadian politics can be bad for your mental health
As a rule of thumb, the more you pay attention to Canada’s political circus, the worse your state of mental health becomes, IMO anyway. On a more serious note, David Clinton got curious about a recent Manhattan Institute project tracing American mental health trends:
Image from The Audit
The Manhattan Institute’s research into the confluence of mental health trends and political leanings in the U.S. generated buzz a while back. Among other things, they discovered that, as of the 2021-22 school year, liberal students were 13-17 percent more likely to seek mental health treatment than their conservative peers. That’s a frightening gap.
I was curious to know if there’s anything like that going on here in Canada. And it turns out that there’s excellent public-facing data waiting for us to drop by and help ourselves. The most recent published version of the Canadian Election Study (CES) dates back to the period around the 2021 federal election — the full dataset from 2025 isn’t yet available.
There were 20,968 respondents in total in the CES survey data from 2021. Having now spent a couple of happy hours with the results, this looks like an excellent representation of Canadian society. The questions go both deep and wide.1
I was able to directly address the political angle to all this using responses to one core question. Participants were asked to situate themselves on a political “scale where 0 means the left and 10 means the right”.
I classified anyone who responded with a number higher than 6 as “far right”, and responses less than 4 were tagged “far left”. The far left cohort had 4,927 members, while there were just 3,891 people in the far right. Those numbers are easily large enough to make distinctions potentially statistically meaningful.
Anxiety
I explored both far right and far left cohorts for how accurately the words “anxious” and “easily upset” applied to them. A response of seven indicates a self-assessment of extreme anxiety, while zero would be Big-Lebowski-level calm.
The average for the right-coded group was 3.47, while those on the left rated themselves 3.88.
Overall Mental Health
Respondents were asked to rate their mental health in relation to their peers where “1” indicates excellent mental health and “5” indicates poor mental health. A total of 3,878 from the far right responded and 3,263 from the far left. The average of all responses on the right was 2.02 (standard deviation: 0.876859) and from the left, 2.32 (0.926268).
- In fact, the average survey took two hours and twenty five minutes to complete! I’m definitely glad they didn’t ask me.
I mentioned the other day that the US was fully justified in “pausing” their participation in the Permanent Joint Board on Defence due to the Canadian government’s continued delinquence on military matters (and Prime Minister Carney’s blatant desire to tweak American noses while neglecting joint interests with the United States. At The Line, Matt Gurney says this won’t be the only tangible sign of American impatience with our ongoing fecklessness:
As I posted on social media when sharing this: “This is another gentle reminder to the f*ckwits in the Canadian government that they are playing with existential fire when they work to actively piss off our American allies.”
First of all, and this will annoy the Elbows Uppers to no end, the undersecretary’s comments are, fundamentally, accurate. Canada has indeed massively underinvested in defence and has also prioritized rhetoric over reality. I completely understand why Canadians hate admitting this — I hate admitting this. Having your flaws pointed out to you by someone you dislike is always a mortifying experience. But I’ve spent almost two decades writing about the very things Colby is pointing out — Canada has allowed its military capability to atrophy to a point, as I noted just a week ago in an episode of On The Line, where we’ll need many years and untold billions of dollars just to rehabilitate the armed forces. Expanding them and adding capabilities will be a whole other level of investment. This is why Canada’s recent major announcements on defence, though good and welcome, are also not enough — it will take a long time and even more money to actually repair what we have allowed to rot.
The other half of what Colby identified is also, alas, accurate. While we were massively underfunding defence and allowing core capabilities to wither and die, or while just totally missing the bus on transformational military developments (hello, drones!), Canada did indeed talk a lot about the rules-based international order and the role of middle powers and punching above our weight and all the rest. Canada focusing on rhetoric instead of reality is, alas, a fair criticism.
Many U.S. administrations called us out on this. We ignored them. Donald Trump is unique in how viciously he is prepared to exploit our weakness, but he’s hardly the first to have noticed it and called us out on it. I carry no water for MAGA or Trump, but they’ve got us dead to rights on this one. The bad orange man didn’t let the navy rust out, repeatedly defer the fighter jet replacement and hobble the army with non-serviceable equipment and recruiting and procurement systems that were actually quite awful at both those things.
We did those things. We did it to ourselves. Colby is simply possessed of the gall to bluntly call us out on our failures, in a way that Canadians aren’t accustomed to and aren’t going to enjoy.
So that’s part of it. But it’s also worth asking why the U.S. is doing this, and especially why they’re doing it now.
Part of it, probably, is just sincere frustration with us. As noted above, Colby’s remarks are accurate. But the timing is interesting. The CUSMA renegotiation deadline looms in early July And in Colby’s remarks, do I detect a whiff of the art of the deal?
The Carney government has made, and continues to make, plenty of announcements about plans, and potential deals, and future capabilities, and so on … but the Americans can’t help but notice that little is actually being done despite all the sound and fury on the PR side. Canada belatedly reached the long-agreed-upon 2% of GDP target for military spending, but most of it was a bookkeeping exercise of moving existing costs onto the Department of National Defence budget (the Canadian Coast Guard and parts of Veterans Affairs) but not much improved in Canada’s actual defence capabilities.
May 18, 2026
QotD: Medical ads
Jonathan David Morris, “Thoughts On Health”, Libertarian Enterprise, 2005-09-18.
May 15, 2026
Sweden – “We’re actually trying to get rid of screens as much as possible”
Back in the early days of the internet, a lot of us were enthusiastic about schools adopting digital technology, as it seemed to be the way of the future for kids to be fully immersed in the online world as part of their education. Reality has harshed the mellow for a lot of us misguided techno-fossils, as there seems to be a very strong correlation between childrens’ (computer) screen use and lower educational achievements. Sweden is trying to reverse this pattern:
“student_ipad_school – 038” by flickingerbrad is licensed under CC BY 2.0 
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According to primary school teachers, many children shamble through the doors today zombified and crying out for their iPads.
Their parents, lined at the school gates, barely say goodbye, what with the hypnotic drivel spewing from their iPhones.
The kids greet their teachers with the YouTube vernacular: “Hi, guys!” When handed a book, they swipe and tear at the unfamiliar paper. They greet each other with: “Welcome to my channel!”
Finally, when they leave, they don’t say goodbye. They say: “Remember to like and subscribe!”
I’m not taking the piss. A friend of mine, tasked with civilising these screen-addled sprogs, confirms what one reads in the newspapers. These chirpy little addicts ransack classrooms crying out for more iPad with the fanatical calculation of tweaking crackheads.
Wherever you may sit on the political spectrum, I hope you agree that a functioning democracy might one day need citizens who can read and write, and who can concentrate beyond a ten-second video clip.
At least one functioning democracy agrees. Recently, Swedish politicians reversed their digital-first obsession by announcing a return to paper and pen. The sensible Swedes have gone analogue. Why? Literacy rates in the cosy Nordic social democracy have collapsed.
“We’re actually trying to get rid of screens as much as possible,” said the Liberal party’s Joar Forsell.
Since 2025, pre-schools are no longer obliged to employ digital ‘tools’ and teachers no longer dole out tablets to kids under two. According to Mr Forsell, reading real books on paper does what schools have for decades avoided: it teaches kids to think. Tablets for toddlers is now från skärm till pärm (from screen to paper.)
High school students now drag their textbooks and notepads to classrooms stripped of screens.
The evidence piles up. Researchers found that hyper-digital tablets-for-toddlers eroded basic skills. Writing by hand, Swedish students learned more and retained more. Wiping away digital mandates, Swedish lawmakers promise more handwriting and books, fewer devices, and quiet reading time.
But it’s not just the Swedes.
Psychologists Pam A. Mueller (Princeton University) and Daniel M. Oppenheimer (UCLA) found handwriting beats typing — at least if learning something is your thing. Students who pecked down verbatim notes on their laptops wrote twice as many words as their pen-and-paper classmates. Who learned and remembered more? Take a guess.
How could this be? Writing by hand is slower. You’re forced to process and reframe information in your own words — the art of thinking. Screens hamper this essential process. When we write by hand, there’s a greater connection between the brain and the finger. This act, they say, cements the information in one’s brain. Essentially, the typists transcribed much. They absorbed little. It’s like paying someone else to have sex for you.
Researchers claim that writing on paper improves everything from recalling a random series of words to grasping and understanding complicated or conceptual ideas. Writing by hand ties down the balloons of motor, visual, and sensory memory.
When studying from their notes, the longhand writers did better on tests. This persisted even when the typists were told to rephrase the material into their own words. They didn’t absorb the material. They parroted it, much like ChatGPT doesn’t know that flipping a glass spills water. It merely knows that the words “flip” and “glass of water” are statistically related to the word “spill”.
And yet, British schools continue marching to the drumbeat of post-literate doom.
The good news: kids are drinking a lot less! But there’s also bad news …
The good news seemed to be that teenage drinking was dropping fast. Fewer underage drinkers, happier teenagers, right? Not so fast …
⚡️The deeper signal is youth risk did not disappear.
It migrated inward.
Teen drinking fell because the old physical world of adolescence got dismantled. Alcohol belonged to a social ecosystem: unsupervised time, cars, parties, local jobs, malls, basements, boredom, flirting, older siblings, house gatherings, and the chaotic peer world where teenagers learned who they were by colliding with other people in real space.
That ecosystem was replaced by phones, surveillance, parental tracking, algorithmic entertainment, social anxiety, online status games, and a much thinner physical commons.
So the surface looks healthier. Fewer kids drinking. Fewer kids using weed. Fewer kids doing reckless things in public.
The hidden layer looks worse. The young are less reckless because they are less socially embodied. Less initiation. Less unsupervised friction. Less courage-building. Less embarrassment and recovery. Less real dating. Less independence. Less contact with the physical world before adulthood demands it.
The old teenage world produced damage, stupidity, alcohol abuse, pregnancy risk, fights, accidents, and bad decisions. No need to romanticize it. But it also produced social reps. It forced young people through discomfort. It made them practice attraction, rejection, conflict, reputation, risk, repair, and status in the open.
The new world suppresses visible risk while increasing invisible fragility.
That is the trade.
A teenager can avoid drinking, avoid parties, avoid sex, avoid driving, avoid real confrontation, avoid rejection, avoid shame, avoid danger, and still arrive at 23 emotionally underbuilt. Cleaner behavior does not automatically mean stronger formation.
This is why the marriage chart and the teen drinking chart are the same story at different stages. People are not suddenly failing to pair in adulthood. The whole pathway into embodied adulthood has been slowing for years before marriage even becomes the question.
The real truth: society solved part of the teen vice problem by shrinking the arena where teenagers become adults.
It took away the dangerous commons and replaced it with controlled isolation.
The result is safer kids with weaker initiation into real life.
May 13, 2026
“The dark genius of bureaucracy”
Auto-translation on the social media site formerly known as Twitter has brought some posts from Brivael Le Pogam to my attention, like this one:
The Invisible Cemetery
Milton Friedman said a phrase that should haunt every European legislator for the rest of their life. On the FDA, he said this: there is overwhelming evidence that they have caused more deaths through delayed approvals than they have saved through early approvals.
Read it twice. More deaths from excessive caution than lives saved by caution.
And no one sees it. That’s the dark genius of bureaucracy.
Bastiat theorized the principle 175 years ago. “What is seen and what is not seen.” The economist, he said, is not distinguished from the bad economist by the ability to see the immediate effect of a decision. Everyone sees that. He is distinguished by the ability to see the invisible effects, the delayed ones, the ones diffused across the entire population.
The self-driving car is the perfect example. And it’s playing out right before our eyes.
Tesla publishes the numbers. One accident every 7 million miles in Autopilot. One accident every 700,000 miles in the average American human. Autopilot is, at this stage, ten times safer than a human. And it’s only getting better, with every release.
Now France. 3,200 deaths on the roads in 2024. 91% involve human error. Speed, alcohol, fatigue, distraction. If we deployed a self-driving car ten times safer tomorrow, we’d divide the carnage by ten. We’re talking about 2,800 lives a year. Over ten years, 28,000 people. The equivalent of an average French town that disappears, because no one pressed the right button in Brussels.
You’ll never see them. No newspaper will headline: “Today, 8 people died because the self-driving car is banned in Europe”. No parliamentary commission will investigate. No bureaucrat will be fired. Those deaths will go in the “road fatality” box. We’ll run moving campaigns with their photos on 4×3 billboards. We’ll say it’s sad, that’s life.
Meanwhile, the first accident of a self-driving car will be front-page news in every paper for three weeks. The regulator will summon the manufacturers. NGOs will call for preventive bans. Deputies will write op-eds. The minister will decree a moratorium.
Five visible deaths will outweigh, in the media and political balance, five thousand invisible deaths. That’s the iron law of bureaucracy. The bureaucrat who authorizes something that goes wrong loses their career. The bureaucrat who bans something that would have saved thousands of lives is never troubled. No one holds them accountable for the deaths they could have prevented. They don’t exist in their statistics. They don’t exist in their trial.
Friedman had identified the exact mechanism: when a regulator errs on the side of laxity, their victims have names, faces, families, lawyers. When they err on the side of caution, their victims are anonymous, scattered, statistical, ghosts. The structure of incentives makes over-regulation rationally inevitable. And the invisible cemetery grows, generation after generation.
Europe is going to sit out 10 years on the self-driving car, just as it sat out on AI, as it sat out on genetic engineering, as it sat out on fourth-generation nuclear. Every time, the same playbook. Precaution, moratorium, ethics committee, white paper, directive, transposition. And every time, behind the curtain of words, deaths that appear in no official statistics.
These are deaths. Not opportunity costs. Not “economic losses”. Human beings who were alive and who died because an innovation that could have saved them was delayed by people whose literal job it is.
That’s what needs to be built, and it’s probably the most important political project of the century that’s opening. A system for accounting for invisible deaths. A registry of the cemetery that no one sees.
For every regulation, every moratorium, every preventive ban, we should be able to produce a signed, dated, quantified estimate of the human cost in lives of the decision. Not direct effects. Delayed effects, indirect ones, statistical ones. How many deaths per year caused by banning a technology that works elsewhere.
Imagine. On the desk of the European commissioner about to sign a moratorium on the self-driving car, a document: “Central estimate, 2,800 deaths per year for the duration of the moratorium. High-end range, 4,100. Low-end range, 1,900. Source: comparative analysis Tesla Autopilot vs. human average, NHTSA and ONISR data, public and audited method.”
On the desk of the European deputy who will vote on the AI Act: “Central estimate, 38 billion euros in lost GDP, 240,000 jobs not created, X deaths per year due to delays in AI medical diagnostics, Y deaths per year due to delays in deploying autonomous drones for medical delivery in rural areas.”
Today, we sign blindly. We sign without cost. We sign with a clear conscience because the deaths we cause are anonymous and the lives we protect have faces. That’s what needs to be broken.
A bureaucracy is an institution that operates without being held accountable for the invisible consequences of its decisions. As long as invisible deaths are not counted, bureaucracy is mechanically, structurally, inevitably a machine for producing deaths it will never see.
Europe isn’t losing a technological battle. It’s filling a cemetery. Year after year. And no one wears mourning. No one lays flowers. No one knows they’re there.
Friedman saw them before everyone else. Bastiat before him. Williams after him. And each posed the same question, which echoes like an accusation through the centuries: who weeps for the deaths we didn’t see coming?
That’s the work ahead of us. Making the invisible cemetery visible. Accounting for it. Auditing it. Publishing it. Confronting every bureaucrat, every day, with the exact list of lives that their signature takes with it.
Before the list becomes ours.
May 7, 2026
QotD: The loss of male spaces led to today’s epidemic of male loneliness
Places where men showed up without an agenda. Where conversation happened sideways, not face-to-face. Where no one asked men to perform vulnerability, explain themselves, or justify their presence.
Those places didn’t disappear because men rejected connection. They disappeared because our culture decided male-only spaces were no longer acceptable. And once they were gone, men were told that their resulting loneliness was a personal failure.
There has been a noticeable shift in recent months. A growing number of articles now
acknowledge male loneliness and even gesture toward men’s emotional needs. On the surface, this looks like progress — and in one narrow sense, it is. For decades, male loneliness was either ignored or mocked.But many of these pieces commit the same quiet betrayal.
After briefly acknowledging that men are lonely, many articles abandon subtlety altogether and place responsibility squarely on men themselves. Men don’t open up enough. Men don’t try hard enough. Men don’t build friendships properly. Men resist emotional growth.
What is missing is the most obvious factor of all: our culture systematically dismantled the spaces where men and boys once formed friendships.
Men Did Not “Forget” How to Connect, They Lost the Places Where Connection Happened
Male friendships have never primarily formed through structured emotional disclosure. They formed through shoulder to shoulder shared activity, regular presence, and low-pressure companionship. Men bonded by working alongside one another, not by facing one another across a table and “processing”.
For generations, this happened naturally in male-only spaces:
- Service clubs
- Fraternal organizations
- Trade guilds and apprenticeships
- Male sports leagues
- Scout troops
- Men’s religious groups
- Informal gathering places like barbershops and workshops
These environments weren’t about exclusion. They were containers — places where boys learned how to be men from men, and where adult men maintained connection without self-consciousness or surveillance.
Now consider what has happened.
- Barbershops are co-ed and transactional.
- Service clubs are now largely co-ed, and the informal freedoms that supported male bonding in male-only environments have largely disappeared.
- Community sports are co-ed or heavily regulated.
- Even the Boy Scouts are co-ed.
One by one, male spaces disappeared — not because men abandoned them, but because our culture increasingly viewed male-only environments as suspicious, outdated, or morally problematic.
The Asymmetry No One Wants to Name
At the same time male spaces were dismantled, female-only spaces proliferated.
- Women-only gyms are accepted.
- Women-only scholarships are celebrated.
- Women-only commissions exist at every level of government.
- Women-only networking events, parking, subway cars, retreats, and support groups are commonplace.
“Women-only” is understood as necessary, protective, and empowering.
“Men-only”, by contrast, is treated as exclusionary at best and dangerous at worst.
The result is an unspoken rule that everyone knows but few admit:
Women may gather without men. Men may not gather without women.
This is not equality. It is a double standard — and it has consequences.
Tom Golden, “The Quiet Lie Behind Male Loneliness”, Men Are Good, 2026-01-05.
May 6, 2026
“I don’t want a solution, I want to dismantle our socio-economic system!”
On his Substack, Christopher Snowden explains how “public health” is just another of the many, many anti-capitalist branches of progressive belief:
Some people don’t really want to solve problems. They want to change the world for other reasons. That was the argument I made in Not Invented Here last year, a multi-author IEA publication that essentially elaborated on this meme …
One example is obesity, which we are told can only be tackled by fundamentally changing the food environment, banning advertising, taxing more products and demonising “Big Food”. None of this has ever actually worked anywhere. We do, however, now have GLP-1 drugs that work wonders for many people.
Plenty of “public health” academics are notably resistant to “fat jabs” because what they really want is to fundamentally change the food environment, ban advertising, tax more products and demonise “Big Food”.
Take this article from three self-described “public health scholars” in JAMA Health Forum, for example. They object to obesity being framed as a “a disease requiring individual treatment” because, they say, it undermines public support for government action. They even complain that “medical societies consistently argue that we do need to both prevent and treat obesity” because treatment — i.e. losing weight — is something that individuals can do for themselves. Moreover, studies have shown that when the public hear about people losing weight on their own initiative, they are less likely to support population-wide policies such as food taxation.
Broadcasting a “we need to do both” message, it turns out, is a counterproductive communications strategy for addressing the obesity epidemic. Studies message-testing obesity narratives find that public support for government action is highest when obesity is framed as the result of food industry manipulation and addresses toxic food environments.
The authors don’t seem particularly interested in whether this narrative is true. The main thing is that it can “build support for addressing upstream drivers of the obesity epidemic”. They conclude that medical professionals should stop talking about GLP-1 drugs in public and bang on about “BiG fOoD” instead.
While we acknowledge that public and media discourse often expect clinicians to comment on treatment efficacy and emergent therapies, in an ideal world, the medical community would move discussions about GLP-1 drugs targeting causes of individual cases in-house, while using its credibility and authority publicly to amplify much needed political discussions about the root causes of increasing obesity incidence.
This messaging should include concrete policy proposals targeting unhealthy food environments shifting the debate toward the structural causes of the obesity epidemic, such as World Health Organization–recommended sugar taxes and other policies that would effectively reverse the rise in ultraprocessed food production, marketing, and consumption and, importantly, the corporate power that has so far prevented governments from enacting these policies.
You can see why they are worried about fat jabs. The drugs work by giving people artificial willpower and prove that if obese people simply eat less food they will stop being obese. It has nothing to do with advertising, price, availability or “corporate power”.
From the perspective of the authors, these drugs are a threat, but what exactly is their perspective? The first author, Luc Hagenaars, has written a lot about sugar taxes which he compiled for his PhD thesis. He also worked at the Dutch Ministry of Health in the early 2020s when the Netherlands was undergoing its anti-liberal counter-revolution. Last year, he wrote an article titled “The Ozempic Era Could Shift Blame for Obesity From Individuals to Commercial Food Systems” which made exactly the opposite argument to the one he is making here.
Update, 8 May: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.
