Jonathan Bodey

A husband and father. A financial coach and software engineer. A reader, listener, and learner. On the side of the rebel Jesus.

[Legal Phil @Legal_Fil]

It’s never a wrong time to remind people of @neontaster’s classic.

[Mark Changizi @MarkChangizi]

Need a name for those who are
- not Woke Left
- not Woke Right
- anti-Islamist
- aggressive to bullies
- not anti-Semitic
- not “I’m not anti-Jew I’m anti-[BS here]”
- for free speech
- for civil liberties
- against “balancing” civil liberties
- for free markets
- for cost benefit analyses
- for tight immigration
- against isolationism
- contemptuous of international law
- against foreign dictatorships
- “America First,” not “Israel Last”
- love Iranians
- “Free Iran” but not “Free Palestine”
- appreciative that strength brings peace
- want Cuba free

Suggestions?

[The Motley Fool @themotleyfool]

The average bear market lasts 289 days.
The average bull market lasts 991 days.

Optimism has always been the better bet.

[Chris Martz @ChrisMartzWX]

Global warming is occurring.

That is just a scientific fact. ✅

Surface-based station data (e.g., NOAA, NASA GISS, Berkley Earth), the bulk tropospheric satellite data (e.g., RSS and UAH), and ocean heat content data are all affirmative on that.

And, yes, mankind's fossil fuel combustion likely does contribute to it [to some extent]. How much is open to debate, and I welcome that discussion.

But what is clear from the observational data:

1⃣ There is no climate crisis. Weather extremes are about the same as they were 50-100 years ago. Only a few metrics have gotten “worse,” such as certain types of drought, but that's mostly a water resource mismanagement issue, not a climate-related one.

2⃣ Quality of life is projected to improve by almost all measurable metrics by 2100 regardless of what the climate system does.

3⃣ Regional / local climate is far more important for everyday life. While a global mean temperature can be computed (you can debate about whether it should be a simple arithmetic average or an area-weighted one), it isn't an overly important value.

This is my entire position in a nutshell. 🌰

It is very much scientifically defensible.

I'm not a climate alarmist (far from it), but I also don't consider myself an all-out skeptic.

I am very much what you would call a “lukewarmer.”

[Daniel Owens @dsowens17]

We should not be governed by pilots.

The cartoon below is often used to mock skepticism about expertise. Yet I suspect it will one day be seen as a revealing artefact of our era, not for its insight, but for the ideology behind it.

At first glance the premise seems reasonable. Of course it would be absurd to let a non pilot fly a plane. But the cartoon is doing far more than that. It is claiming that governance is primarily a technocratic operation rather than a political process.

In doing so, it collapses democratic decision-making into a purely technical exercise. It undermines popular sovereignty, the principle that people are free to choose their leaders, even imperfect ones, and it dismisses the core democratic idea of civilian oversight over power.

Flying a plane is a highly specific technical task with a single correct procedure. Governing a society is not. It involves value judgments, trade offs, contested goals, and questions of accountability. Expertise can inform those decisions, but it cannot replace democratic legitimacy.

The cartoon endorses a top down technocratic order which is at its core authoritarian. When people reject this framing, they are not necessarily being irrational. They are reacting to being excluded from decisions that shape their lives, even if some of the alternatives they reach for have serious flaws of their own.

[Charles C. W. Cooke @charlescwcooke]

It just isn't that difficult to say "those GOP groyper texts are gross, and I don't want those people in my party"/"Jay Jones shouldn't be AG with those views"/"Platner had a Nazi tattoo and said awful things online, and that's bad and disqualifying." You can just type it.

[Louis Anslow @LouisAnslow]

Worth reflecting on the fact over-precaution about nuclear power and GMOs increased catastrophic risk to humanity.

[Elizabeth Nolan Brown @ENBrown]

I want to point out 1 glaring error I noticed in the new Kamala Harris book. It claims that 350 transgender people, including 15 kids, were murdered in America in 2024

I read that and immediately knew that could not be right. And it's not right

According to Trans Europe and Central Asia, there were 350 trans murders *around the world* last year

What's interesting to me is that neither Harris nor anyone else who read this book before publication though that stat seemed off.

Like, she grabbed the stat quickly, or had someone grab it for her, plugged it in, OK. I can see how that might happen. But neither Harris nor anyone else reading back through it thought, man, that seems a bit high?!?

It really gets at how warped people's sense of reality is when it comes to things like this.

[James R. Harrigan @JamesRHarrigan]

I swear politicians need to be forced to read the Constitution out loud, in public as they take office and then every time they try to pull some shit like this.

[Gene Healy @GeneHealy]

Dementiagate revealed that the 25th Amendment’s eject button is nearly impossible to trigger; Trump’s first term showed that impeachment is broken too. If the presidency has grown too big to fire, that’s all the more reason to shrink the job, I argue @Reason (link in reply).

[David Burge @iowahawkblog]

As an arguably heterosexual penis person of no color who enjoys automobiles and sports, I can confidently say I would enthusiastically vote for a flaming gay minority vegan bicyclist with a grasp of the Constitution and the laws of economics, but hey maybe that's just me

[David Burge @iowahawkblog]

I would like to declare #StopTheSlopWeek on X the everything platform, where we work together to end the scourge of garbage engagement accounts.

Tired of your timeline getting firehose AI slop, pilfered Tik Tok shit, or SEO optimized ragebait? Here's what you can do:

[Kat Timpf @KatTimpf]

This is the perfect analogy; u cannot tell me otherwise

CC: @elonmusk, @DOGE

[Lawyer Cat* @LawyerCat_]

Happy Shut The Fuck Up Friday

[Chris Josephs @Chrisjjosephs]

Dan Crenshaw just had a wild take on banning political stock trading

"Nobody can point out any other examples (of shady trades)"

Since we run Pelosi Tracker & have $12M literally copying Dan's portfolio right now on Autopilot

We thought we'd share some examples

[Thomas Chatterton Williams @thomaschattwill]

Content aside. One of the reasons podcasts have exploded their audiences while cable news dwindles is that it’s actually just unbearable as a viewer to watch a bunch of people shout over each other instead of fully making their points.

[Patrick Ruffini @PatrickRuffini]

Social Security private accounts was viewed as an example of second term hubris by George W. Bush but it would have had fantastic results if it passed, more than quadrupling the value of accounts since 2005.

[Brendan Carr @BrendanCarrFCC]

@SawyerMerritt @SpaceX 2023 FCC: Claims that Starlink is not capable of providing high-speed Internet to thousands of people as the reason for revoking an $885M award to the company.

2024 FCC: Claims that Starlink provides so much high-speed Internet that the word monopoly should be tossed out there.

[PoIiMath @politicalmath]

I would like billionaires to build libraries and rockets

I would like billionaires to send books into space and then put them in libraries so kids can read a book that has been to the moon

[Megan McArdle @asymmetricinfo]

Republicans mad about the unfairness of Democrats swapping in a new candidate at the last minute whom they hadn't prepared to campaign against--you know, you could turn the tables, pull the same stunt, and even the odds again ...