In the hopes of encouraging a more civil, and illuminating, discourse, here is another episode of William F. Buckley, Jr.’s “Firing Line”.
With the 25th anniversary of the 9-11 attacks on the Twin Towers, let us look back 40 years ago when William F. Buckley, Jr., Binyamin Netanyahu, and Claude de Kemoularia discussed terrorism and America’s response to it as viewed from abroad.
Another “quick takes” on items where there is too little to say to make a complete article, but is still important enough to comment on.
The focus this time: Go to sleep forever as they take your face from you.
First, a little mood music:
Carrying on…
Transplants are nothing new, but euthanizing a patient to use the patient’s face in a transplant is Hollywood become real.
“Vall d’Hebron University Hospital in Barcelona has performed the world’s first face transplant with a donor who passed away from euthanasia.
“Around 100 medical professionals took part in the partial face transplant, a highly complex operation using neurovascular microsurgery techniques that lasted about 24 hours
“…
“The euthanasia law in Spain, which came into force in June 2021, opened up a new possibility for transplants.
“In the case of this transplant, as the donor had received prior authorization, medical workers could do more planning than usual.
“The transplant was also the first in the world in which 3D planning could be done on both the donor and the recipient.
“The donor was a woman who had requested euthanasia and who had expressed her desire to be a donor, also of the face if necessary.”
It has become a fad amongst many of the “postliberals” (AKA “Post-American Right”) to bash President Ronald Reagan as some type of disaster, much of it cribbed from the Left in the ‘80s, as if he singlehandedly ended some fantasy ‘70s utopia of high morals and economic prosperity for the working man.
O.K., now that you’ve gotten your laughter under control, let us fisk one such fool who either is outright ignorant or glosses over historical reality at the time, such as having a Democratic House of Representatives for all eight years he served and a Senate majority (the first in nearly three decades) for only six of the eight.
“Leaving Reagan off the chart is deserving. An honest assessment of his legacy would make any honest person wonder why he has been so widely considered by the Boomers to be one of the greatest “conservative” statesmen of all time.
“His legacy includes…
“Granting amnesty to around 3 million illegal immigrants as president.”
Remember how the GOP never fully controlled Congress during Reagan’s Presidency? In return for a one-time amnesty which would help clear the deck to focus on enforcement, it became illegal to knowingly hire illegal aliens and created penalties for doing so. Since that one-off, conservatives have opposed amnesty, especially without securing the border before even considering it.
“Strengthening the Voting Rights Act and expanding Section II, including provisions that the Supreme Court just narrowed thanks to the Trump administration.”
Reagan opposed many of the proposals Congress was voting on which would have imposed any effect that could be seen as discriminatory, including a strict “results” test for discriminatory practices that would have resulted in proportional racial representation, which the Reagan administration got prohibited from being used. Considering it passed out of Congress by veto-proof majority (389-24 in the House; 85-8 in the Senate), we can thank Reagan for making the final bill popular. This is also a reminder that a lot of what the fool criticizes as selling out the Left was incredibly popular and had bipartisan support.
The economy is the free interaction of free people within the limits, be they broad or narrow, of the law. The aggregate effect of this is what people talk about when they talk about the state of the economy. The economy is not some machine with knobs to be twisted to produce desired ends by (un)intellegent designers and central planers. Some people, though, do not seem to understand this, as James Lindsay explains, which is quoted in full do to the limit of Twitter’s/X’s embed feature.
The post-liberals’ main selling point, I think, is that it believes the economy should work for the people, not people for the economy.
This isn’t just wrong in the usual sense, though; it’s a category error. It fundamentally misunderstands what the (or an) economy is.
The economy isn’t this kind of black box thing that the government controls, for better or for worse. The economy is roughly something like the activity that arises around production, service, and trade among a population, and between populations, that are doing those things.
That is, nobody controls the economy, and the economy can’t be made to work for people. Neither do people work for the economy.
People work. They produce; they trade; and they serve. The aggregate outcome of that effort is called “the economy.”
The following guest post was provided by Minitrue via telescreen and transcribed by speakwrite
If you aren’t committing crimethink or doing doubleplusungood things then why would you harm society to commit ownthink by opposing the constant gaze of bb who loves you.. Good people who truly love bb have a bellyful love of being watched and showing that they do not commit facecrime by the state that loves them so. If bb didn’t watch people, then crimethinkers wouldn’t go to joycamp!
So crimestop and love the protecting look of interconnected camera networks and the centralized surveillance databases they feed into.
With Love,
Big Brother
P.S. We’ve always been at war with Eastasia
News of the Week for August 30th, 2026
In the hopes of encouraging a more civil, and illuminating, discourse, here is another episode of William F. Buckley, Jr.’s “Firing Line”.
The role of the church in politics, and specific political policies and goals, has been a bipartisan element, often pitting a faith against itself. Such was the debate when William F. Buckley, Jr. and William Sloane Coffin discussed the role of the church militant.
Until next Friday.
Another “quick takes” on items where there is too little to say to make a complete article, but is still important enough to comment on.
The focus this time: Rights for “Nature” come at the expense of actual rights for humans.
First, a little mood music:
Carrying on…
Remember when National Geographic was about tribal boobies? Now they’re all in on “Nature Rights”.
“Today, the National Geographic Society, in collaboration with The Alfred Kobacker and Elizabeth Trimbach Fund, are proud to announce For Nature. Announcement of the new program comes in anticipation of the celebration of the International Day for Biological Diversity, (May 22). For Nature will support National Geographic Explorer Callie Veelenturf’s vision to advance the Rights of Nature movement and provide funding for ten Explorer projects to advance this work.
“The Rights of Nature movement seeks to bring rights-based legal protection to threatened and endangered species and habitats. Under the newly-launched For Nature program, this movement will be further catalyzed and expanded with the help of the Society’s global community of researchers and conservationists, storytelling and education expertise, technology and communications support and elevation opportunities to drive the impact of this work and grow the movement for species and habitat protections.”
While A.I. models have been prominent in the news as of late, even more fascinating computing technologies are being rapidly developed, namely the use of biological organoids. The potential is so great, it may even outstrip silicone-chip based A.I..
“For now, these neural computers are mostly of interest to researchers who want to work with neurons without taking on the tedious wet-lab husbandry themselves. Eventually, however, the company hopes that neurons will prove themselves to be an energy-efficient, resilient substrate for more general computing applications—including some tasks currently handled by AI, like image recognition and classification.
“‘When you think about what you want from AI, it’s biology,’ said Brett Kagan, Cortical Labs’ chief operating officer, when I reached him over Zoom. ‘You want it to be self-repairing as much as possible. You want it to be adaptable. You want it to be long-lived. You want it to be energy-efficient. These are all features you get for free in biology.’”
Size of the organoids continues to be a problem, but not for long.
“[O]rganoids can’t grow much bigger than 5 millimeters anyway. Once they reach a certain size, without a vascular system to pump in oxygen and pump out metabolic wastes, they develop a “necrotic core” and suffocate. This has created an upper ceiling for the organoid debate, but it won’t hold much longer. At Johns Hopkins, the nanotechnologist David Gracias is developing biomimetic artificial arteries; across town, at the Medical School, Kathuria creates rough blood vessel networks from endothelial organoids.”
This hopeful development means once thing: Genetically engineered catgirl soldiers will help us fight the Butlerian Jihad against the clankers!
Pictured: Imminent Clanker Death
“For now, it seems that in the race toward conscious machines, there will be two lanes. One will be paved with rare earth minerals and silicon—forced, at enormous financial and energy cost, to model the brain from the top-down, in the form of artificial neural networks. Although there’s a lot these systems can do well, they will never be brains. Nothing forged from silicon ever could. As Cortical Labs’ Brett Kagan put it, ‘How can you have a truly adaptable, flexible system in an inflexible substrate?’
“Which leaves the other path. Admittedly, this one will be slippery and meandering—adapting, as all living things do, to the journey as it goes. It might not be the most direct route, but in the evolutionary history of life on Earth, it’s the only thing that has ever led to intelligence.
“So I’m betting on the neurons. I made up my mind back at that strange mothership of a library in San Diego, when I saw those axons reaching for one another across the void. Something in the innocence of their striving moved me. After all, my cells and yours have been doing the same thing since the day we were born. Trying to connect. And one thing we can count on—through the rise and fall of silicon—is that they’re never going to stop.”
The economic ideas of Vice-President Vance has been gather much attention, including criticism, as of late. One such criticism of Vance’s disdain of the Dollar as the world’s reserve currency comes from Phil W. Magness, which is copied here in full due to the limitations of Twitter/X’s embeds.
A quick explainer on why Vance wants a weaker dollar:
It’s not because he recognizes some underlying problem with fiat currency. It’s not because he wants to bring back the gold standard, nor is it because he envisions a future bitcoin or cryptocurrency standard.
Vance’s objection to the dollar’s reserve currency position is entirely about protectionism and tariffs.
You can see this clearly in his public commentaries about the dollar’s reserve currency status. He uses the same argument every time. It begins by likening the reserve status to a “resource curse” (which is a completely inappropriate and confused analogy). Then he claims that the dollar’s position makes consumer goods “too cheap” (via imports), while also insisting that this somehow harms US production (via exports). He frequently deprecates those “cheap” consumption goods as “mostly useless imports” and juxtaposes them to a “hollowed out” industrial production sector, while portraying the dollar’s strength as a “tax on producers.”
This is a classic protectionist fallacy, rooted in the belief that trade is a zero sum game and that trade deficits indicate that “we” as a country are losing things to the rest of the world on net. Currency enters the equation because Vance subscribes to an extremely shallow version of the “twin deficits hypothesis” – the belief that our federal budget deficit is somehow causing our trade deficit.
This theory is based upon mistaking an accounting identity for a policy tool, wherein the GDP identity (Y = C + I + G + (X-M)) can be converted by rearranging the terms to show an accounting relationship between the trade term (X-M) and government spending and taxes. The mistake here is that this is not an operationalizable formula where you can manipulate the terms – it’s simply an accounting identity. As such, the “twin deficits” hypothesis does not reliably hold in practice. Empirical evidence of it from the US over the last 75 years is thin to nonexistent, suggesting a weak spurious relationship at best and a pattern that often breaks down with the two deficits moving in opposite directions (e.g. as happened from 1998-2001) or when they evolved at wildly incongruous magnitudes (most of recent history).
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