I never knew people ate eyebrows.

“Medicare for All” sounds great. Free healthcare for everyone, what’s not to like? But here’s what the cheerleaders don’t tell you: Medicare only pays about 80% of your bill. There is no cap on what you could owe. So, if you get cancer and treatment costs a million dollars, you’ll owe $200,000. That’s not “universal coverage.” That’s a government plan that leaves you broke. And while politicians promise to expand it, they quietly outlawed the one kind of plan that actually limits your costs. Let’s talk about what “Medicare for All” really means.

One would think.

"Do you have a better plan than using leeches to remove bad humors?? No?? Well then leeches it is!"

You confuse your feelings with the Constitution, much like AOC does.

Lolbertarians huffing their own farts again. Arizona v. United States (2012):

As the man once said, "If you like your subsidy, you can keep your subsidy." Or something like that.

I don't think folks realize how surreal this is. The fact that blue states refuse to respect federal property should alarm Democrat voters. After all, it didn't go so well the last time they tried it.

Oh gosh, this I cannot defend at all. I don’t even know where to start. George Floyd’s death was exploited and laundered through a reality distortion field to usher in a wholesale cultural revolution. Let’s start with who he was: he led a life of criminality and delinquency, and he was an avid drug abuser. His death happened amid a context stoked by our media and universities of America being a cauldron of white supremacy and racially-motivated police brutality against blacks specifically. This premise was false, and the canonization of Floyd under this false premise was a contemptuous ruse. You know very well just how much damage was sustained and lives lost as a result of BLM. And the liberties taken to usher in DEI programs and other equity-promoting schemes and enact a cancel culture that punished anyone who failed to pay sufficient fealty to views in line with critical race theory, have all now backfired. Charlie Kirk’s canonization is not based on lies. He lived an honorable, moral life. In fact, the constant smears he endured were based on lies about him. Extreme and hateful views (e.g about him wanting to stone gays) were imputed upon him and parroted by influential left-leaning journalists and commentators. Thankfully, Charlie left copious amounts of source material and people have been going directly to these sources. They’ve come to realize that what they were told didn’t match with who he was which is what they could see with their own eyes. The political environment surrounding Charlie’s death wasn’t a lie either, unlike George Floyd’s. There *is* a trend of escalating violence - and in particular political violence. Many political targets have faced assassination attempts, some successful (Melissa Hortman) and some, by the grace of God, unsuccessful (Trump, Kavanaugh, etc). ICE agents have been shot at, and Tesla owners and dealerships dealt with violent attacks. Kirk’s death is an accurate reflection of this reality and not a cynical perversion and abuse of the truth which is what happened in George Floyd’s case. So it is beyond legitimate for the authorities to respond to his assassination before things spiral further. It is an insult to all that is good in this world to make this comparison on an individual level, and on the cultural level.

Incurious you say.

Charlie Kirk wasn't assassinated because of the Second Amendment, but because of the First. At UVA, I reminded students: someone who thinks differently than you isn't your enemy. Free speech is the foundation of every liberty we enjoy and must never be surrendered to fear or violence.

Tylenol

Chalk Supremacist.

LEEEEEEEEEEEEROY DUCKINS!

We just keep making the same observations of the same mistakes over and over and over again. I don't think much has changed since Ug debated Gork over a dinosaur carcass. What I'm saying is that we need to be more efficient. We need a single Unicode value each meme.

Large language models (LLMs) -- the technology falsely labeled "artificial intelligence" by flacks in industry and media -- have managed to evoke the testier side of my personality. I've banned LLM-written text from this journal and my blog, and stomped hard from time to time on attempts to divert conversations into rhapsodies about the supposed wonders of the technology or the equal and opposite rhapsodies about how LLMs will surely destroy us all. Partly, my reaction is driven by the sheer dishonesty of the "AI" label. LLMs are not intelligent. They possess no consciousness, no understanding, no capacity for reflection. All they do is produce strings of words (or other coded responses) that are statistically likely to be associated with each other. In effect, they're simply much more complicated equivalents of those automated text generators so many of us had fun with a few years back, which would produce plausible-sounding gobbledygook imitating, say, postmodern scholarship. All this came to a head, in a certain sense, when one of my readers asked yesterday how the word "AI" ought to be pronounced, and suggested "Aaaaiiiieeeee!" While a case can be made for that bloodcurdling possibility, my immediate reaction was, "They're not artificial intelligences, they're just large language models" and to try to figure out how "LLM" would be pronounced. That was when I achieved enlightenment. Okay, it was a very small and rather silly enlightenment, but I'll take what I can get. Say "LLM" out loud. If you've ever heard a recording of JRR Tolkien reading a certain selection from The Hobbit, you'll know instantly what you're saying. You're saying the sound that gave one of Tolkien's characters his name. You're saying "Gollum" -- or, more precisely "goLLuM." Imagine these programs slinking around in the dark places of the internet, muttering something about "My Precious." Makes sense, doesn't it? And of course a lot of the people who get obsessed with LLMs show definite Gollum-esque characteristics. So I think from now on we should start referring to these programs as goLLuMs. What do you think?

Progressive shocked to find out gambling is going on in this establishment.

There are currently three factions in what was the free speech coalition 1) Purists: They believe free speech is more important than any other consideration 2) Partisans: They believe in free speech for me, but not for thee. It’s OK when we do it, but not when you do it. 3) Game Theoreticians: Free speech as a stable equilibrium…advocate for "tit-for-tat" reciprocity to deter abuses, recognizing that without symmetric consequences, the powerful will always suppress the powerless, eroding norms for all The Game Theoretician isn't a fencesitter; they're a strategist playing the long game. They champion free speech as the optimal Nash equilibrium in a polarized democracy, where everyone benefits from open discourse, but they know ideals alone don't enforce it Once the norms have been broken, history shows that without credible threats of retaliation, the dominant side will always tilt the board: think the left's deplatforming waves post-2016 (e.g. Alex Jones' bans) or the right's current pushback after Charlie Kirk's assassination last week, like calls for Kimmel’s suspension The key insight? Asymmetry breeds abuse. If the right now abstains from "taste of their own medicine" tactics (boycotts, firings, or regulatory nudges) the left learns zero cost for future censorship when they regain power Enter deterrence: a calibrated tit-for-tat, where violations trigger proportional responses. This isn't vengeance; it's vaccination. It forces empathy through experience, making both sides internalize that free speech should be sacrosanct And so it is possible to still be on the side of free speech, while also using this opportunity to call out the hypocrisy of the left because they are the ones who broke the system In other words: I want free speech for all, but I also don’t wanna be a sucker and have to face censorship again when the left comes into power. Therefore, I’m going to take this moment in time to criticize the left and call out their hypocrisy, while taking my time in coming around to criticizing the right for doing the same because I’m approaching this problem in terms of game theory and while I share the purist’s objective, I think this is a better way to achieve it. Because shaming the left or appealing to morality or principles sure didn’t work one bit!

Chilling.