Update for the week ending February 23
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There's a new episode of the Worker & Parasite podcast out. In it we discuss A Generation of Sociopaths by Bruce Cannon Gibney. You can listen to it here. You can see all episodes here.
New log entries from the past week.
I'm experimenting with adding X interactions on my blog and this is a test to that end. Please ignore this, or you can say hello.
Gary Taubes on choosing diet over GLP-1 drugs like Ozempic
He seems a little defensive on this piece, but I agree with him in part. He argues that a keto diet like he advocates will tend to have the same results as these drugs for weight loss, but then he also says that while GLP-1 drugs may help with chronic diseases, we don’t know that a keto diet wouldn’t make you even more healthy.
At home we call this the Elon vs. RFK Jr. debate. Elon famously tweeted, “Nothing would do more to improve the health, lifespan and quality of life for Americans than making GLP inhibitors super low cost to the public. Nothing else is even close.” RFK by contrast has said that "If we just gave good food, three meals a day, to every man, woman and child in our country, we could solve the obesity and diabetes epidemic overnight [without drugs].” In my view they’re both right.
As I understand it from friends who’ve taken them, these drugs work for weight loss because they suppress your hunger and cravings for food. So you eat fewer calories. Taubes will hate me saying it, but that’s also why a keto diet works. If you don’t have the facility to eat fewer calories than you expend, whether through a keto diet or just a well-regulated balanced diet, then a drug will certainly bail you out—and that will be a great thing for millions. But this has two big caveats.
First, if you eat fewer calories because, thanks to the drug, you’re less hungry, but the calories you do eat are donuts and pizza, then I imagine you’ll still get diabetes and heart diseases and other chronic diseases. I really hope people on these drugs realize that if they want to be healthy and not just thin then diet, exercise, and sleep still matter. What I would hate to see, but what would be so American, is a pill that just lets us avoid the most obvious aesthetic consequences of shitty diet and exercise.
Second, and related, is that if everyone is on Ozempic, then there goes a big reason to clean up our horrendous food system. And our food is screwed up in part because of government interventions in the incentives in food markets. Government subsidized corn and sugar make us obese because they’re so cheap they’re in everything, but not to worry because government subsidized drugs will make you thin.
Lee Friedlander, Memphis, 2003.
Can Radical Change Cure a Declining Nation?
Countries, indeed empires, grow old and decline because they become sick with demosclerosis.
Demosclerosis is the accretion of laws and rules over time, and the accumulation of interest groups who benefit from and lobby for keeping existing subsidies and protections and adding more. As more groups secure benefits, it becomes increasingly difficult to reform policies or cut spending, leading to gridlock, inefficiency, stagnation, and eventually paralysis.
For example, President Trump recently signed an executive order directing the Mint to stop producing pennies, and already the penny lobby is on red alert, campaigning against the move.
This explanation for why nations have an old age was laid out by Mancur Olson in “The Rise and Decline of Nations,” which we discussed on the podcast last year. He also explains how some declining and stagnant nations have been reinvigorated.
Olson points us to the natural experiment of England, Germany, and Japan after World War II. Germany and Japan experienced rapid post-war growth, while England, which was not defeated and occupied, entered decades of decline and ultimately the end of its empire. What was the difference?
The war was a cleansing fire that destroyed Germany and Japan’s built-up mounds of laws and rules and bureaucracy and, more importantly, their entrenched rent-seeking interest groups. They were reset to zero, allowing for more efficient markets and economic dynamism—at least for a while until demosclerosis could set in again. England, on the other hand, retained its entrenched interest groups, and the rest is history.
The point is that the only way to reset is through a cleansing fire.
I, for one, would rather avoid being decimated in a war. However, I’ve also come to the conclusion that public choice precludes the kind of incrementalist reform that could reinvigorate the United States. So if we want to end stagnation, the best we can hope for is a great political upheaval that does us more good than harm.
Is Trump II this upheaval?
I don’t know, but I hope so. I see a lot that I don’t like, but there’s no need for me to offer a catalogue. You can just flip over to CNN or the NYT. I also see a lot I like.
It’s amazing to me that for all of the (often warranted) outrage over the twisted norms, petty corruption, and uncloaked bullying, and other DOGE-like things of this administration, Trump’s opposition (at least in the media) is largely missing the real upheaval.
For example, in his first day in office, Trump rescinded President Johnson’s Executive Order 11246, thus ending affirmative action and all its tributary workplace regulations, and also undid Jimmy Carter’s 1977 executive order that allows development projects to be mired in years of “environmental impact statement” red tape.
Talk about cleansing fire. These have been two of the biggest wet blankets over the economy. Gone just like that. There are caveats, to be sure, but it’s more than any Republican administration (including his first one) has ever done. And maybe it’s a topic for a different post why Trump is today seemingly immune to traditional interest group pressures.
Will it work? If I had to bet everything I had, I’d say no. But do I think it’s worth the gamble? Well, we don’t have much choice at this point, so I prefer to be optimistic.
The proof of the pudding will be in the eating, as they say. In an interview before he took office, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent put forward what I think is a fair standard to judge the success of this administration:
He has advised Trump to pursue a policy he calls 3-3-3, inspired by former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, who revitalized the Japanese economy in the 2010s with his “three-arrow” economic policy. Bessent’s “three arrows” include cutting the budget deficit to 3% of gross domestic product by 2028, spurring GDP growth of 3% through deregulation and producing an additional 3 million barrels of oil or its equivalent a day.
Let’s check back here in three years.
On a recent episode of his podcast, Jonah Goldberg asks Bret Stephens why J.D. Vance is lecturing Europeans about democracy when he has previously criticized neocons for doing that kind of thing.
Goldberg says, “He hectors them about how Romania canceled some regional elections where some fascists did well or something like that.”
Stephens corrects him, saying, “It was the presidential election, but there was almost certainly outside interference.”
I’ve seen a lot of that over the past few days.
Lest I fall for misinformation—as it seems Goldberg did—I looked into it myself, and the bottom line is that it’s incredibly murky.
It does appear that there was a coordinated influencer campaign on TikTok in support of Călin Georgescu, but the claim that it was Russian interference rests solely on the Romanian intelligence services’ assertion that it mirrors Russian tactics.
There are also reports suggesting that the campaign was actually orchestrated by the center-right liberal party, which paid to amplify a particular hashtag. Supporters of Georgescu then hijacked that hashtag by using it themselves, thereby reaping the outsized views.
Who the hell knows?
The point is, I’m surprised at how otherwise careful pundits feel free to parrot EU talking points. The lesson: always triangulate, my friends.
A great directory of personal websites. Hundreds of them.
Great source of inspiration. You can add your own via a simple pull request. Everyone should have their own site.
Here's a new executive order signed yesterday that launches a sweeping deregulatory push
This is what I mean by radical change.
The order creates a systematic process to review every federal regulation—not just for benefit-cost analysis, but for constitutionality, statutory compliance, proper delegated authority, and more. This is (hopefully) the “deconstruction of the administrative state” that every Republican president (including Trump I) promised but failed to deliver.
And yet, I have seen almost nothing about this in the media. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I can’t find anything about it in the NYT or WSJ—or really anywhere else. Just a lone Politico article. The truly radical stuff continues to fly under the radar.
Joan Didion, John Gregory Dunne, and Quintana Roo Dunne, Hollywood, 1968.
You may have a seen a bunch of weird tweets from me lately.
This is because I’ve been trying to implement a POSSE (Publish on Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere) system on my blog, as I’ve mentioned before.
The basic idea is that you post once to your blog, which you own, and which no one can take away or censor, and then from there the content is automatically also posted to other places where one might have followers, like Twitter, Mastodon, etc. You can also then point readers of your blog back to those outside platforms for conversation in lieu of a comments section.
The benefit of this approach is that you get to both own your content and leverage the reach and interaction of social media platforms. The downside so far is that until I get it right there are a bunch of weird tweets.
At the moment I’m working on integrating Twitter, because that’s where everyone is. After that I was thinking of adding Threads, Mastodon, and Nostr. Threads should be easy enough, but Mastodon may not be worth the squeeze. Nostr I plan to work on mainly out of hobbyist interest.
I’d love to hear from folks who’ve tried implementing this approach.
Project 2025 Completion Tracker
I’m not certain, but I think this site was created by Trump opponents. To their credit, though, it is simply presenting without comment “nearly 300 measurable objectives from the Project 2025 document” and whether they’ve been implemented. Neat way to keep track whatever side you’re on.