Friend M. Wells

Once you experience, at least once in your life, being very right when the rest of the world was telling you that you were very wrong, then you become immune to groupthink and herd mentality, as you've learned firsthand that most people don't know what they are talking about:

Breaking: Trump orders the dismantling of the US Forest Service. All regional offices are being shut down and the research program destroyed.

If sanctions on Russian oil have been lifted because of the war in the Middle East, will the U.S. sanctions be reimposed now that there is a ceasefire? I think that an answer to this question will expose the reason for lifting sanctions in the first place. We just need to wait and see. In my view, Russia played the Americans again – played the President of the United States. The Russians lied about the role their oil supplies played in keeping oil markets stable. If the U.S. reimposes sanctions, that would be fair. But if it doesn’t… We heard that Russia wanted Americans to buy certain energy assets in Europe belonging to Lukoil. I ask myself, “If I want to sell sanctioned energy assets, what do I do?” I come up with a scheme to lift sanctions. How else could I sell it? From an interview with Rai Radio 1 (3/3).

The Helen DeWitt incident really does highlight the divide in modern literary culture between rare but true genius and the dominant hyper professionalism/MFA culture that privileges self-promotional skill over actual literary work

Amazon is removing 4K streaming from Prime Video in April and putting it behind its ad-free tier paywall The ad-free tier is also increasing from $3 to $5 a month

The countdown officially begins. One month from TODAY, the Metro D Line Extension to Wilshire/La Brea, Wilshire/Fairfax and Wilshire/La Cienega officially opens 🥳

A student today at my elite university admitted to me today that she took a class so she could work on reading for more than 20 minutes at a time. She can't read. She mainly skims and summarizes, she says and still gets A's. This student is, by professional standards, illiterate. Gonna have high GPA when she graduates. This conversation was had after 6 of 22 students dropped my course because the maximum reading per week in one week was over 100 pages. What people aren't grasping is that this is literally *dangerous*. These people are going to be come doctors, engineers, etc. They are - by any metric - vastly less capable than prior generations. These effects are cumulative over a lifetime. This grade inflation is part of the problem, but not even close to the entirety. And the problem obviously starts in K-12. Students don't know history because, you can't actually become historically literate on the advice of 'never assign more than 30 pages a week'. You can't develop any of the skills that came with literacy. This is, quite honestly, a civilizational catastrophe.

Public access status check FAIL! Chaplin Keaton Lloyd Alley is still illegally fenced off, creating private commercial space out of a public right of way, preventing tourists and locals from walking in the footsteps of silent motion picture masters. Fix this, Hugo Soto-Martinez!