Will Collier

Aerospace engineer and writer, blogging since 1997. "He smelt the old Evil and knew it for what it was." --Tolkien _ War/Ea/gle

[Kimberly Ross @SouthernKeeks]

“Gunther” here is an influencer. I can’t say what he genuinely believes, but he clearly knows this kind of rhetoric gets engagement. It’s lazy, intellectually bankrupt nonsense. Rather than examine their failures and improve, they’d rather insist the whole thing was stolen.

[Will Collier @willcollier]

@JonahDispatch

[Will Collier @willcollier]

@DanielJHannan Last summer my wife was knocked over by a shoplifter fleeing the Sainsbury’s at Marble Arch. Which would have been entirely unthinkable when I lived in London in the early 90’s.

The store’s “security” guard just watched and did nothing.

[Antonio Rodriguez @4ntonioR]

A weak point of the monopsony-minimum wage story is that the US restaurant industry, where minimum wages bind by far the most, is extremely competitive by conventional concentration measures (HHI) and quite likely also by labor fluidity measures. The urban wage premium…

[Dan McLaughlin @baseballcrank]

It's nonsense to say the problem was the Senate when Trump asked the Senate to vote on so few of the things he did.

[Phil Magness @PhilWMagness]

I warned in May 2025 that tariffs were going to cost the GOP the midterms.

[AG @AGHamilton29]

In case you think this is a one-off…

The same China-tied group, Party for Socialism and Liberation, has been actively leading efforts to shut down data center construction across the country.

They did the same thing in Dekalb County Georgia in August…

[Scott Lincicome @scottlincicome]

Lots of excellent points in here (read it all), but this is probably my favorite

[Will Collier @willcollier]

@GayPatriot That was cool

[Heather Mac Donald @HMDatMI]

New York Times reporter Fox Butterfield amused conservative crime analysts in the late 1990s and early 2000s by writing articles under headlines such as:

“Crime Keeps on Falling, but Prisons Keep on Filling.”

“Prison Population Growing Although Crime Rate Drops.”

“Number in Prison Grows Despite Crime Reduction.”

To Butterfield, a simultaneous crime drop and incarceration increase was a paradox. The possibility that locking up criminals would help lower crime was all but inconceivable.

The liberal policy world is still in the grips of what become known as the Butterfield Fallacy. An article this week in Stateline, a left-leaning news website, puzzles over the fact that low-level arrests are rising “despite national crime declines.” Such contrasting trend lines are precisely what Broken Windows theory predicts. Criminals are polymorphous offenders; if they break one law, they will likely break others as well. Because they commit low-level offenses more frequently than homicide, robbery, and other felonies, focusing on misdemeanor crime is an efficient way to reduce all crime, besides providing the orderly streets that the public cares the most about.

The study on which Stateline reports focused on vagrancy, drug possession, and immigration arrests. The latter nearly tripled from 2024 to 2025. Vagrant encampments are a hotbed of crime. They also signal to other would-be criminals that no one is in control of the streets. Dismantling them accomplishes numerous salutary goals. Arrests for drug possession are almost always a proxy for street drug trafficking. The latter routinely leads to drive-by shootings.

I had been skeptical of Trump’s claims to own the felony crime drop but the data on immigration arrests and the fall in index crime suggest a credible connection. As newly emboldened Democrats seek to further emasculate immigration enforcement and to fortify sanctuary jurisdictions against the rule of law, we can expect a natural experiment testing that connection.
Stateline and the anti-incarceration group that did the misdemeanor study are already playing the race card, warning that increases in enforcement will widen racial disparities in the criminal justice system. This, too, is a harbinger of the discourse under an increasingly Democratic-run polity.
Those racial disparities reflect different rates of offending and different rates of 911 calls for service. The disparities that should be the focus of law enforcement are those in victimization rates, something that progressives almost universally refuse to acknowledge. That massive victimization gap will also widen if enforcement is cut back, but at least the police won’t be accosting black criminals.

[STEVEN SEAQUAL FOREVER @LonelyTalegater]

We let Bert Auburn slip away but that’s not happening with Shug.

[Associate Deans @ass_deans]

Our graduate students are striking? I thought they were just larping a real labor movement during a period where people were actually struggling

[Jason Brodsky @JasonMBrodsky]

"Trump in recent weeks has privately criticized the June memorandum of understanding that Vance helped negotiate and questioned whether it was a costly mistake, two officials said, arguing that it gave Iran critical time to regroup and rake in oil revenues before the U.S. imposed a naval blockade."

https://t.co/fjdTKegUnX

[Ken Gardner @KenGardner11]

Pathetic. We shouldn't be hiding our Cabinet officials in bunkers. We should be forcing IRG cockroaches into THEIR bunkers -- and then bomb the bunkers.

[Christian Toto @HollywoodInToto]

Per request, here's the lede for my 'How to Rob a Bank' review (coming ASAP)

"How to Rob a Bank" might be the most morally irresponsible mainstream movie in a generation.

[Johnnie Walker Evans @SeanCrutchfiel6]

@willcollier It’s kind of sad to see even our predisposition to be suspicious of outsiders and foreigners give way to a market that doesn’t care for the local tastes simply because they’re the only one who can “afford” to operate at that margin within the community

[Will Collier @willcollier]

@SeanCrutchfiel6 All I’m saying here is, the Rustic Red Cheddar is… really good.

But I’d rather have Winn Dixie back.

[The Dispatch @thedispatch]

“Vance thinks he can use animosity toward Israel to win the nomination by solidifying the nationalist faction in a crowded GOP field, then force the rest of the party to hold their nose and back him as the nominee.” | @JonahDispatch
https://t.co/CQ0FrnKy0L

[Jake Broe @RealJakeBroe]

NATO expansion is a myth. It is a Russian lie. Here is the map.

After World War II the Russians militarily occupied half the European continent. The Russians picked their leaders. They wrote their laws. They brutalized their people and took whatever they wanted.

When the Soviet Union collapsed, all of these peoples who had suffered immensely under the Russians were desperate to get real security and protection from the Russians.

Russia is the ONLY cause of NATO enlargement because the people of Eastern Europe always knew they were going to be invaded again as soon as the Russians succeeded at some form of economic capitalism.

Russian imperialism is the only cause of this war.

[Scott Lincicome @scottlincicome]

@EWErickson He's also been a big driver of all the equity stakes (mainly via the CHIPS Act).