Imagine you, as a single man, create a baby via surrogacy. Your child eventually asks, “where is mama? Who is mama?” The answer amounts to: “I purchased eggs from one woman and paid another woman to gestate and give birth to you. The anonymous egg donor doesn’t know you exist, and neither one considers herself your mother.” Is the child consoled by your reassurances that you “wanted him very much”? Maybe the child is fine, maybe traumatized. All I know is, I would never want to be in that position, having to answer that child’s utterly heartbreaking questions.

When I was a kid, any time someone would praise me for being well behaved, studious, whatever, my mom would brightly say, “that’s because she has great genes!”, gesturing to herself with big up-and-down arms. This is the face she would have made if she had been called racist.

It’s heartbreaking how much financial stress ordinary people go through to bring a child into the world. Meanwhile, 41% of all US births are covered by Medicaid: the insured pays nothing for labor & delivery. Even those here illegally get the same deal via Emergency Medicaid.

In the latest performative outrage against JD Vance, haters speak as though Usha is a devout Hindu rather than an agnostic, as her own husband described her. How do they know she believes all the truth claims of that religion? Or maybe they don’t care? It’s more offensive to conscript Usha into Hinduism by virtue of her ethnicity than to say, as JD did, “I hope that her own seeking and free will lead her to see that Christianity is true, but if not, ok.”

I genuinely never understand why so-called conservatives express so little interest in animal welfare. It’s bizarre. Animal welfare isn’t just about the health and happiness of the animals, although that is hugely important, it’s about the quality of the nutrition food provides, stewardship of the countryside, ensuring the food supply is in the hands of real farmers—local people who care about their communities—rather than mega corporations that don’t give a rat’s ass and just want to make as much money as possible.

Calling someone a Karen means nothing anymore. It used to be “entitled people”, now it’s just used to refer to people who want a normal functioning society, or are not happy with below minimum standards.

The same problem we’re seeing with flooding the market with foreign beef already happened in seafood. Over 80% of America’s seafood is imported, not because we can’t fish, but because our industry’s been strangled by regulation while other nations dump junk here under shady labels, sketchy labor, and zero oversight. Then we’re told: “We can’t supply Americans with enough U.S. seafood.” That’s nonsense. We have some of the most sustainable fisheries on the planet. We just need the will to fix it - invest in innovation, cut unnecessary labor costs, end union chokeholds, and rebuild a domestic supply chain that actually feeds Americans

Amazing how the Democrats didn’t hesitate to shut down the government and won’t budge after weeks, compared to republicans during the Biden admin, voting for every terrible spending bill and explaining their lack of resistance with “people would be mad at us”

The price of ground beef has gone up by 62% since 2019, while the price of milk has gone up by 37% over the same period. Milk is a good benchmark because that gives you an idea of how much of the price increase is due to monetary inflation + increased cost of inputs in cattle farming. So a significant amount of the beef price increase is clearly due to other factors. A major driver has been multi-year droughts over this period, which led ranchers to sell off more of their cows than normal because of reduced grazing land and high feed and hay costs. In 2022, the US cattle herd shrank to its smallest size since the 1950s. The Covid era processing plant shutdowns also injected disruption that has yet to be fully unwound. And the war in Ukraine has driven up prices in grain, fertilizer, and energy. The average cattle farmer is in their late 50s. With the current high price, many are choosing to get out while they can sell high. This leads to the cattle herd getting even smaller, producing fewer calves, further pressuring prices upwards as there is not enough calves to both grow the herd and satisfy current beef demand. Exports have also risen, with countries like China and Japan buying more U.S. beef, further reducing domestic availability Another major problem is that 4 companies control 85% of the beef processing market. There are too few USDA licensed slaughterhouses with available capacity for the smaller ranchers. But even if we fix the meat processing problem, the fundamental issue of the national herd size still remains to be addressed. It makes sense to import calves with suitable genetics, which Argentina and Paraguay have. The problem with importing calves is that we need to not import the New World Screwworm with them, which would further devastate the U.S. cattle herd. The smart longterm solution is to go in heavily on restoring American Bison as our main keystone meat species. Bison are more efficient foragers in arid landscapes, wandering farther from water sources and grazing on a wider variety of native grasses, even in dry or rugged terrain. Cattle, by contrast, tend to congregate near water and shade, leading to overgrazing in those areas and poorer adaptation to water scarcity. Bison tolerate heat and dry conditions more effectively than cattle, which often require supplemental feed or water in similar scenarios. They also have better endurance in blizzards, and are much more effective at deterring predators. Their meat is superior to beef in flavor—I exclusively go for bison ribeye over angus—and in nutritional profile, from fat composition to B vitamin and mineral content.

The response to @herandrews’s piece is an example of Anton’s Celebration Parallax: like the great replacement, you’re only allowed to notice the great feminization if you are cheering it on.

Throw rotten tomatoes at me, fine, but I hate takeout delivery apps. Tragedy of the commons situation that contributes to the slop-ification of society

Explain to me why $6.99 for a 14.5 oz bag of chips flash-produced by machines is not a problem But $8.09 for 1 lb of grass-finished organic beef tended for months on U.S. pasture by a ranch family is a crisis so dire we must put farmers out of business over it

I don’t think Andrews was saying that the rise of women is the only cause of the shift, more like an accelerant. The loss of practitioners’ humility in service to the core institutions of society, and the shift to their seeing it as a platform or tool to wield, is a broader trend

I think homeschooling demands a lot of self-motivation from children, and they can struggle with “why should I do this”? Even for adults, if you’re just alone in your house with no boss or colleagues or office, it can be hard to make yourself settle down and work. Schools provide external sources of motivation. The kid wants to keep up with his peers, or he wants the approval of his teacher, or just the institutional solidity of it all make him feel like the whole thing is real, it counts, it has weight. Many of my homeschooling friends seem mystified when their kid balks and refuses to work. I think this is just baked in and doesn’t mean you’re doing something wrong or that your kid has ADD or whatever. If you have a kid who is always full of wonder and cheerfully does all his tasks as asked, maybe you’re awesome or maybe you’re lucky and homeschooling just works well for him in particular. I still think the defiant ones are normal in struggling with motivation.

Part of the problem is that public school districts are structurally rigid, designed with an assumption of high, stable enrollment. If declining enrollment is a durable trend (given low birth rates, out-migration, and parents’ desire for academic rigor), maybe they should adapt accordingly? See it as an opportunity to streamline? Yes, it’s good to try to reform so that your public schools are more attractive. But in the long term, it seems like they should plan on “managed decline” and scaling down in smart ways. I’m not trying to vilify or denigrate public education, btw. Just seems like big structural shifts are needed in places like NYC, CA, FL, Chicago, where enrollment declines are most pronounced. But it feels taboo to talk about this.

Higher Ed got greedy. There aren’t enough academically inclined people to sustain all the universities and colleges if they sell the old product (rigor, excellence, “pain is gain”). Just as the mortgage-backed securities industry eventually ran out of stable, trustworthy mortgages and had to downgrade the product to meet demand, so do the universities run out of nerds and relax standards to accommodate people who never would have thought to attend before—because they want growth. And thanks to federal loans artificially inflating demand, they can market themselves as a product for the entire population. Watching the poor kids on those Charlie Kirk debate videos—so incoherent and illogical, so ill-served and cheated by this system—I couldn’t help but think that a good number of mid- to low-tier universities in our country shouldn’t exist. What do they understand their purpose to be, I wonder? If the answer is career prep, it has to be the most inefficient and deceptive program to accomplish that.

A pet theory of mine is that the Second Vatican Council unleashed a new type of clericalism, that of the professional layman: the parish secretary/parish council/chancery employee types, who gatekeep tf out of the sacraments & lord it over both clergy & less privileged laymen.

Just a few decades ago, many working-class people with minimal formal education read Dickens. The current notion that such passages are too difficult for university students is extremely concerning and an indictment of our age.

Went to the local burger place with the kids and sat out front. As the drive-thru line fills up, I hear Charlie Kirk’s voice. At least three different people sitting in their cars watching CK clips on their phones. And at the neighboring table, a couple talking about how wonderful he was. The day it happened, I picked up the kids from school and took them to a playground. I was staring at my phone trying not to cry again, and another mom was near me doing the same thing. We ended up having a great conversation about him. She admired him greatly despite being less conservative. It’s hard to believe he’s gone, just because it feels like he’s everywhere now. I think @ScottAdamsSays was right: a potent energy unleashed.

In my efforts to launch a classical charter school, I talk to a lot of parents who dislike the public/govt school system. They feel drawn to classical education not because they love Homer and Aristotle or socratic seminars—they are not nerds and have never heard of that stuff—but because they get the feeling that this kind of school would love their child. That love means surrounding the child with beauty, caring about his/her soul and not just some denuded concept of "skills", maintaining an orderly classroom environment and high academic standards that take the child's learning seriously. Whatever Randi Weingarten and the mainstream education system are doing, many parents get the feeling that they don't care about their child. Their priorities are elsewhere.