Does a nation, its laws, its institutions, its economy, its rulers… owe special favor to the well-being of its own people over that of the rest of the world? Simplest test of political legitimacy imaginable. And yet many, even on the nominal right, can’t pass it.

Obviously true. I believe in Fullback Nationalism.

Excited to see my latest article published in Arena today. Whoever can build the machines that can design machines stands a good chance of winning the future.

Just as all knowledge-making institutions are reaching historic nadirs of trustworthiness and competency, a technology arrives—virtually overnight—to completely usurp their authority and make them obsolete in almost every way. You will appreciate the blessings of AI soon enough.

I was just thinking about this article. Nearly five years on, the bifurcation thesis still holds.

It is wild that no one has explained to Ford that Canada supplies the U.S. with less than 1% of U.S. electricity and it can easily be replaced but Canada would lose billions in revenue. Also, the U.S. supplies Canada with electricity when hydro resources run low, 90%+ of Canadian crude is refined in Texas, and the gas pipelines supplying Ontario and Quebec run through the U.S.

Does anyone remember this amazing story? On July 2, 1982, a truck driver from California flew 16,000 feet into the sky in a lawn chair. Larry Walters, 33, from San Pedro, had dreamed of flying his whole life. He bought 42 eight-foot helium weather balloons, tied them to a regular Sears lawn chair, strapped on a parachute, packed a BB gun to pop balloons to descend, a CB radio, sandwiches, and a six-pack of beer. He expected to float a few hundred feet above his backyard. He cut the rope and shot up like a rocket — to 16,000 feet. He drifted directly into the main approach path for LAX. Two airline pilots radioed the tower: they had just passed a man in a lawn chair holding a gun at 16,000 feet. For 45 minutes, he floated over Los Angeles, freezing cold, too scared to shoot balloons because he might fall. Finally, he started popping balloons one by one and slowly descended. He landed tangled in power lines in Long Beach, California, causing a blackout. When police arrested him, they asked why he did it. He said, "A man can't just sit around." The FAA fined him $4,000. He became a national folk hero — Lawnchair Larry — and inspired the movie Up.

My favorite photo of all time.

The Chinese are absolutely doing this. “China launched an information operation known to researchers as Dragonbridge, which flooded social media platforms with posts raising environmental concerns about rare-earth mining and processing. In July 2022, the FBI issued warnings about Chinese influence operations aimed at tribal, business, and political leaders.” palladiummag.com/2022/08/08/…

One of the coolest uses of a text effect that I’ve seen in a long while. Bravo @hermeuscorp!

We as a country should not allow Boeing to discontinue the 747. It is the most beautiful jetliner.

In his debut for the New Outlook, @Daniel_Bring writes on the permitting regime ended American energy dominance. America produced 60% of the world's oil at the outset of WWII and supplied 85% of Allied wartime demand. Then, in 1970, we decided the question was no longer where you can't build, but whether you can build at all.

Air Force opened its football practice with low passes from an F-16 flown by the team's former fullback Nate Walker, now a fighter pilot 🇺🇸

$200B/y or $2T/10y. Seemingly no segment of the Democratic coalition is seriously thinking through fiscal constraints and/or how their competing priorities interact with one another.

Samo Burja on why America should hand 50,000 green cards to Europe's best young engineers: "What I would honestly do, and this is politically completely impossible, is run Operation Paperclip Maximizer. Give 50,000 green cards to German engineers and tell them, you can come work here for 150,000 euros, and that's big money in Germany, and extremely cheap here. Then those high-precision engineers could be employed at US companies that would scale." "It's not gonna be in US-allied nations, because all of those companies are super old. The one exception is South Korea. Japanese companies are dominated by the old, German companies are dominated by the old. The CEO of Rheinmetall mocked drone production in Ukraine as if it's something housewives assemble in their spare time. That's not the kind of attitude where the young engineers get to do the cool stuff." "If we let that talent from Europe, and frankly Japan, an immigration opportunity directly targeted at entire industrial verticals, to just take them en masse and bring them here, US companies would make very good use of them." "We do have some US talent, but it takes players like Elon, and he'd have to prioritize. Tesla would need a capital injection and would need to prioritize its humanoid robots over its cars, and then I'd totally believe it could do that. But why do that when you can still make the cars even better, keep your share in China, and eat up the remainder of the legacy car companies here in the US?" "I think every car in the US basically should be a Tesla based on fundamentals today. I think it should be the iPhone of cars." @SamoBurja @bismarckanlys

Littoral combat is about to get genuinely insane

China's economy started stalling 2021, and no one seems to have noticed. The structural issues in its economy are going to be almost impossible to overcome. There isn't going to be the money to maintain a lot of the impressive infrastructure they have built post financial crises. "In the past five years, China’s augmented deficit (which includes off-budget spending) has reached nearly 15 per cent of GDP, higher than any other major country, pushing augmented government debt to 135 per cent of GDP. Unlike the US and most other countries, China has rapidly mounting debts in the private sector as well. Total debt amounts to nearly 350 per cent of GDP — higher than in the US despite China’s much lower per capita income." giftarticle.ft.com/giftartic…

The material prosperity of the white and Asian populations of Anglo settler nations is remarkable. Only a tiny tax haven that doesn’t count the 50% of its workforce that lives just outside its border ranks higher.

Fireworks in Los Angeles, California 🇺🇸

we're taking this flag to the stars