March 22, 2026

IT’S COME TO THIS:

 

After declaring “God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him,” Nietzsche wrote that Europe wasn’t going to like what comes next. “Alas, the time of the most despicable man is coming,” Nietzsche warned Europe in 1885′s Also sprach Zarathustra, “he that is no longer able to despise himself. Behold, I show you the last man…The earth has become small, and on it hops the last man, who makes everything small. His race is as ineradicable as the flea-beetle; the last man lives longest.”

Posted at 1:45 pm by Ed Driscoll

WALTER DURANTY CALLED, AND SAID YOU MIGHT WANT TO DIAL THE DECADENCE BACK A BIT:

UPDATE:

And all in service to the Omnicause:

(Classical allusion in headline.)

Posted at 1:35 pm by Ed Driscoll

A NATION CAN DECLINE FOR A LONG TIME:

Posted at 1:30 pm by Glenn Reynolds

INSECT-IFYING HUMANITY: The Paul Ehrlich Legacy.

Far from suffering rising death rates, the world is healthier than ever before. By the reckoning of the U.N. Population Division, global life expectancy has leapt since 1968: from under 56 years to over 73 years. Indeed, worldwide life expectancy today is roughly three years higher than was America’s when The Population Bomb came out.

But then again, Ehrlich wasn’t great at forecasting the American future, either: Among his more memorable howlers was a 1969 conjecture that overuse of pesticides might drive down U.S. life expectancy at birth to just 42 years by 1980.

One of the reasons worldwide life expectancy has been rising over the postwar era is that food is becoming steadily more plentiful—so plentiful, in fact, that overnutrition is displacing undernutrition as the globe’s principal dietary problem. By 2021, indeed, more women of childbearing age in India were measured as overweight than underweight.

For its part, the marked rise in worldwide caloric availability per capita has been facilitated by dramatic long-term declines in the cost of food. By 2024, the inflation-adjusted prices of the main cereals—corn, rice, and wheat—were less than half as high as when The Population Bomb came out. This means that food is actually less scarce today than when our planetary population was four and a half billion smaller.

Ehrlich was never able to understand this paradox—or why his constant prognostications about the human future were so unfailingly erroneous. But the reason is really very simple. Professor Ehrlich was a genuine expert in population: It’s just that he studied butterflies.

As Tom Wolfe wrote in his 2000 essay, “In the Land of the Rococo Marxists,” “An intellectual is a person knowledgeable in one field who speaks out only in others.”

In “Paul Ehrlich’s Unexploded Ordnance,” James Lileks begins with a flashback to the doomsday-obsessed 1970s before concluding:

The subhead of Ehrlich’s New York Times obituary was amusing: “His best-selling 1968 book, which forecast global famines, made him a leader of the environmental movement. But he faced criticism when his predictions proved premature.” Premature. As in, “It’ll surely happen eventually, and we hope so because people are a pestilence and Mother Earth weeps every time a baby is born.” Optimism, of course, is for fools who just don’t know how bad things are — and who can actually close their eyes at night without thinking about microplastics.

As populations crash all over the world, the specter of numberless hordes clashing over the last pack of peanuts no longer haunts the leftist imagination. It might occur to them that societies could suffer from population decline, particularly in places where the system is set up to extract money from one small group and give it a much larger one. Well, if it comes to that, we can just turn to incompatible cultures and import grand quantities of sullen dudes who are disinclined to adapt. If they vote correctly, what’s the downside? Okay, well, some of them might blow themselves up at a Christmas celebration, but that’s the price you gotta pay. The metaphorical Population Bomb was horrible! The literal population bomb, well, we can work with that.

Governor Walz and Mayor Mamdani chuckle and shrug their shoulders.

Posted at 1:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

NOT ANTI-WAR, JUST ON THE OTHER SIDE:

Related: Julia Ioffe, who in 2018 said that Trump was radicalizing more people than ISIS, was asking “Is Trump Headed for an Iran Quagmire?” on March 2nd, the day after the first US and Israeli bombs and missiles were launched.

And as a result:

Posted at 12:30 pm by Ed Driscoll

GREAT MOMENTS IN OMNIPOTENT TOURIST SYNDROME: Left-Wing Activists Descend on Crisis-Stricken Cuba, Enjoy Luxury Hotels, Ride AC Buses.

The convoy includes a mix of activists, political figures, and organizations from across the global Left. Among them is leftist streamer Hasan Piker, who broadcast from Havana to his large social media following while promising to produce additional “content” from the trip.

Other participants include international political figures such as Jeremy Corbyn and representatives from leftist parties across Latin America and Europe.

Some of the groups involved, such as The People’s Forum and Code Pink, have previously drawn scrutiny from U.S. officials over alleged ties to foreign influence networks.

The effort has also been linked to Mariela Castro, daughter of former Cuban leader Raúl Castro, underscoring the close coordination between activists and the Cuban government. Organizers say the convoy delivered solar panels, food, and medical supplies, including cancer treatments, to help alleviate the island’s crisis.

Cuba has also received aid shipments from countries including Mexico, Brazil, and China in recent weeks, as concerns grow over a potential humanitarian emergency. Still, questions remain about how the convoy’s aid will be distributed, and whether it will reach ordinary Cubans or be funneled through government-controlled channels.

Such efforts often double as political theater, bolstering the regime’s narrative while doing little to address systemic issues. The images coming out of Havana this weekend highlight a jarring divide: foreign activists documenting their “solidarity” tour with reliable electricity, comfortable transport, and direct access to top officials. Meanwhile, millions of Cubans live through daily blackouts, food shortages, and a collapsing economy.

Reliable electricity, comfortable transport, direct access to top officials, and an Internet connection to the outside world for me, but not for thee:

(Classical reference in headline.)

Posted at 12:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

AMERICA FIRST:

Posted at 12:03 pm by Glenn Reynolds

PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT:

Veteran airline pilots are always welcome to take up the craft of acting as a second career, however:

 

Posted at 10:44 am by Ed Driscoll

SONNY BUNCH: Chuck Norris, 1940–2026.

Invasion USA is one such absurdity: One of the most expensive films in the Cannon canon, the film is borderline incoherent, with Norris frequently appearing out of nowhere to deliver nearly spectral justice on a band of Soviet-Cuban guerrillas attempting to destabilize the United States by , for some reason, invading America through Miami. But he shows up, kicks ass, and the film has, oddly, had an outsized impact in the world.

“Invasion USA became an underground sensation in Romania, with bootleg videos of the film passed around and helping to fuel the 1989 uprising” against Nicolae Ceauşescu, de Semlyen notes in his book. According to James Bruner, who worked on the film with Norris and director Joseph Zito, “They use the poster, to this day, in Romania when they protest against the government. . . . Ultimately, action movies are about freedom. Overcoming evil, in whatever form it may be.”

* * * * * * * *

Norris’s greatest success was probably in Walker: Texas Ranger, a procedural that ran for eight seasons on CBS before entering syndication immortality. But he arguably found a bigger surge of fame as one of the early internet memes, a sort of parodic tough-guy bit emblemized with the moniker “Chuck Norris Facts.” Some examples cribbed from Wikipedia: “When the bogeyman goes to sleep every night, he checks his closet for Chuck Norris”; “Chuck Norris has a polar bear rug at home. It’s not dead, it’s just afraid to move”; and “Chuck Norris once killed two stones with one bird.”

What can I say: The internet used to be fun.

Read the whole thing.

Posted at 10:14 am by Ed Driscoll

COMMUNISM IS NOT THE “EQUAL SHARING OF MISERY.” THE NOMENKLATURA AND THEIR CRONIES ALWAYS DO FINE:

Posted at 8:59 am by Glenn Reynolds

I DON’T WANT TO HEAR ANOTHER GODDAMN WORD ABOUT TEDDY ROOSEVELT’S CARBON FOOTPRINT!

(Classical allusion in headline.)

Posted at 8:44 am by Ed Driscoll

BOND MARKET MAY BE A LAST GUARDRAIL ON FAR-LEFT MAYORS AS MOODY’S GOES ‘NEGATIVE’ ON MAMDANI’S NEW YORK:

A mostly obscure and widely derided sector of the financial industry—bond rating agencies—may be one of the few remaining things with the power to save some of America’s largest cities from destruction by the policies of the far-left mayors who run them.

Moody’s Ratings this week revised its outlook on New York City to “negative” from “stable.”

“The negative outlook reflects the emergence of sizable and persistent projected budget gaps that signal underlying structural imbalance and reduced financial flexibility,” the agency said, noting that if New York City is struggling to balance its budget even in a strong economy, things could worsen “if economic growth slows sharply or an outright downturn materializes.”

“That the city projects large and persistent imbalances under still-favorable economic and revenue conditions highlights the extent of its underlying structural budget challenges,” Moody’s said.

Analysts at S&P Global, another ratings agency, also warned that Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s plans “make it difficult to sustain budgetary balance beyond fiscal years 2026 and 2027,” a Bloomberg report said.

Moody’s and S&P Global have since been joined by Fitch, and Kroll:

As I wrote last fall, I’m absolutely certain that the New York Daily News has a “TRUMP TO CITY: DROP DEAD” cover page already laid out as an Adobe InDesign file and ready to go for when Mamdani takes office and demands a bailout.

Posted at 8:14 am by Ed Driscoll

NEWS YOU CAN USE: “I’ve always said to pay attention to the people in Washington DC, specifically the [R]epublicans, who claimed Robert Mueller was an honorable figure.  As soon as you hear that sentiment, you know that is a corrupt conniving bastard speaking.”

 

Posted at 8:14 am by Ed Driscoll

SALENA ZITO: Our Civilian-Military Bond Is Cracked. “Our relationship and understanding of our military, and military families, is broken. Why? When you have less than half of 1% of people in this country currently serving in our military, our understanding of their lives is both limited and isolated.”

Posted at 8:00 am by Glenn Reynolds

HAHA:

Posted at 7:30 am by Glenn Reynolds