Random stuff I find interesting and you may not.
Taxpayers have spent hundreds of billions more on completely ineffective daycare than even Somalis have been able to pilfer. The Trump administration announced it is pausing all child-care payments to Minnesota in light of explosive revelations about Somali-saturated fraud rings siphoning billions from federal welfare programs. State officials in Ohio, where the second-largest Somali population … Read more
Money expert Clark Howard believes in protecting consumers, educating people on practical financial matters and repeating himself to make key points memorable. If you listen to his podcast, you’ve heard him rail against Zelle. You may have heard him discuss why he generally doesn’t like payment apps. Some apps do a better job of protecting … Read more
Opposition to technological innovation is as mistaken as it is bipartisan. Bernie Sanders thinks that Amazon warehouse jobs are soul-crushing, backbreaking, and exploitative. He is also steadfastly opposed to any automation that would eliminate these undesirable positions. “Big Tech oligarchs are coming for your job,” said the independent Vermont senator on X in response to … Read more
How big food and big pharma hatched a crisis. They lied. For 50 years, nutrition “experts” told you eggs would kill you. A University of South Australia study just proved them wrong. Eggs don’t cause heart disease. They never did. The methodology was embarrassingly simple. Separate the effects of cholesterol from those of saturated fat. … Read more
There’s one industry that consistently ranks dead last, or pretty darn close, in customer satisfaction surveys year after year. Want to guess which one? It’s the internet service providers. Their reputation for abysmal service is well-earned, and frankly, it’s been in the toilet for a long time. So, where did this all come from? For … Read more
American officials usually accuse China of trying to take over our manufacturing, but that’s old news. China took over our manufacturing long ago. And the parts it still hasn’t taken over are usually the parts that it doesn’t want or that are too uneconomical to be worth taking over. Taking over America’s manufacturing was never … Read more
AMERICANS HAVE expressed distress over the demise of manufacturing in this country for as long as I can remember. Often that distress has been reflected in popular culture. In “My Hometown,” a hit from his blockbuster album “Born in the U.S.A.,” Bruce Springsteen lamented the economic decline of small-town America and the disappearance of working-class … Read more
The ‘gee shucks’ routine was precisely that: a routine. But what excuse did the press have to play along? America’s weirdest governor re-emerged on the national stage last week to re-energize the floundering Democratic Party and help “fill the [leadership] void.” However, rather than galvanize his colleagues, Walz, who waves hello with both hands, mostly … Read more
Actress, mother of two, and school activist Sophie Winkleman began her recent address on children at the 2025 Alliance for Responsible Citizenship Conference in London by describing a recent scene from a packed London bus. Standing over a young man and a young woman, both intent on their smartphones, Winkleman noticed that each was on … Read more
It is a good guess that a lot of moms and dads succumbed to pressure this Christmas – either from their children’s pleading or peer-pressure in the form of wanting to be the “cool parents” – and ended up buying their sons and daughters smart phones for Christmas gifts. If you are one of these … Read more
To keep crooks from wreaking havoc with your financial information, it’s a must that you have a credit freeze in place. Money expert Clark Howard is a huge advocate of freezing your credit as a way to better protect your finances and keep your hard-earned money away from criminals. “A credit freeze is the best … Read more
U.S. — Boomers across the country prepared for church this morning by setting their cell phone ring volume to its absolute max. In addition to making sure the phone was not on silent mode and the volume turned up high, boomers reportedly also spent a moment to carefully select the most annoying stock ringtone available. … Read more
Data brokers like National Public Data typically get their information by scouring federal, state and local government records. Those government files include voting registries, property filings, marriage certificates, motor vehicle records, criminal records, court documents, death records, professional licenses, bankruptcy filings, and more. Americans may believe they have the right to opt out of having … Read more
Blurring out your home on Google Maps takes only a few minutes, and it can shield your household from the prying eyes of stalkers and would-be criminals. Google’s Street View cars have traveled down virtually every road in the U.S., which means you can view almost any piece of property in the country in high … Read more
The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness, by Jonathan Haidt (Penguin Random House, 400 pp., $30) In 2018’s The Coddling of The American Mind, Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt contended that kids are inherently “antifragile”—that is, they benefit from adversity. But instead of “preparing the child … Read more
Fascinating analysis of the use of drones on a modern battlefield—that is, Ukraine—and the inability of the US Air Force to react to this change. The F-35A certainly remains an important platform for high-intensity conventional warfare. But the Air Force is planning to buy 1,763 of the aircraft, which will remain in service through the … Read more
I have been amused by many of the reports of Google Gemini’s peculiar behavior (for excellent examples see here, here, here, here, and read Jeff’s piece), but, in my view, the most interesting thing about this episode is what it has shown about where Google now is as a company. All told, Google Gemini has … Read more
Consumer Reports is reporting that Facebook has built a massive surveillance network: Using a panel of 709 volunteers who shared archives of their Facebook data, Consumer Reports found that a total of 186,892 companies sent data about them to the social network. On average, each participant in the study had their data sent to Facebook … Read more
One of the oldest malware tricks in the book — hacked websites claiming visitors need to update their Web browser before they can view any content — has roared back to life in the past few months. New research shows the attackers behind one such scheme have developed an ingenious way of keeping their malware … Read more
The map of schools that are in the network of the Institute for Catholic Liberal Education continues to be ever more populated, but we still have large areas in the United States with no schools deeply dedicated to the Catholic tradition. (See here for a commentary on Catholic schools that are not so dedicated to … Read more
The amount of screen time spent by one-year-olds is associated with developmental delays. This finding, by researchers at Tohoku University, with collaborators at Hamamatsu University School of Medicine, was published in the journal JAMA Pediatrics. The research examined 7,097 mother-child pairs participating in the Tohoku Medical Megabank Project Birth and Three-Generation Cohort Study. Each child’s … Read more
Artificial intelligence is expediting the race to the future, working its way into medicine, education, and politics. Now it can even save your smile. Florian Hillen helped trail-blaze the still largely-uncharted territory of A.I. in dentistry by developing VideaHealth, a dental A.I. platform developing software now accessible to 90% of practices across the U.S. Eager … Read more
With a few clicks, I moved more than 15 years of email messages from Gmail to Proton Mail, a smaller email provider in Switzerland. I was surprised how easy it was. I’m not quitting Gmail. Yet. But this experiment showed me what it could be like if moving our digital lives were as easy as … Read more
America must catch up to Europe in accepting the role of peer influence in adolescent gender dysphoria. Transgenderism is the belief that every person has a “gender identity” (an inner sense of being male, female, something else, or in between) distinct from his or her sex and that, when the two conflict, gender identity should … Read more
In recent decades, progressive politics has been underwritten by the ascendant economic titans of capital, technology, and communication. Big Tech and financial firms have long financed Democratic causes, led by those such as George Soros and the now-disgraced crypto-master Sam Bankman-Fried, who was released last month on a $250 million bail deal. Yet for all … Read more