W. Clay Jackson, MD, DipTh

It’s all in Him.

I'll probably get clobbered for this, but here goes: Please, can everyone, right or left, MAGA or anti-MAGA, Republican or Democrat, stop catastrophizing and trying to get everyone on your side worked up into a rage? It's not Flight 93. We're not on the verge of fascism. We do not need to take desperate measures. Our fellow citizens with whom we disagree are not devils incarnate or personifications of evil. We need to argue with our political adversaries--passionately perhaps--but with respect for their humanity and dignity. We don't need to destroy them. That mustn't be our aim. We all say we believe in democracy. Good! But democracy is all about persuading, giving reasons, engaging one another as fellow citizens, despite our disagreements. Let's rebuild civic friendship. We can do this. (Thank you for your attention to this matter.)

Although we don’t yet have the details about the motives behind last night's shooting at the White House Correspondents Dinner, it’s incumbent upon all us to reject the idea that violence has any place in our democracy. It’s also a sobering reminder of the courage and sacrifice that U.S. Secret Service Agents show every day. I’m grateful to them – and thankful that the agent who was shot is going to be okay.

@Avonleebythesea Marvelous

Found in the 12 year old’s backpack 😅 She’s apparently been borrowing from the collection of books that were donated to the shop by a retired NASA engineer and taking them to school to read

Rick Monday saved the American flag 50 years ago today. And today, the Dodgers and members of the U.S. Marine Corps recognized the man and the moment in a pregame ceremony.

@jacqueboatman Oh my

Tolkien, coffee, carrot cake cinnamon rolls ✨

When the US federal income tax was instituted, about 3% of the population was affected, with a base tax rate of 1% (top rate 7%). The Revenue Act of 1913 (after the 16th Amendment) imposed a 1% tax on incomes over $3,000 ($100,000 today), rising to 7% above $500,000. Exemptions meant only the wealthy paid. A government that presumes the right to take a particular person’s wealth will eventually presume the right to take everyone’s wealth.

Humans tried to tame horses 5,500 years ago. It didn't work. Those horses eventually went feral, and we had to start over 1,300 years later with a different bloodline. A group in Kazakhstan called the Botai kept horses for milk and meat around 3500 BCE. A 2021 Nature study read the DNA of 273 ancient horses and proved every horse alive today comes from a different population entirely. The successful domestication happened 4,200 years ago near the Volga and Don rivers. Those horses spread across Asia and Europe in 500 years, wiping out every other horse bloodline. Two tiny changes in horse DNA made it work. One mutation appeared about 5,000 years ago and made horses less jumpy. The other came 4,200 years ago and gave horses backs strong enough to carry a grown person; before that, they were the size of ponies. This is why chariots came first as the main use of horses, and regular horseback riding only became common centuries later. Before rideable horses reached the Middle East, the Sumerians made their own by crossbreeding domesticated donkeys with wild onagers, a wild Asian cousin of the donkey. Onagers can hit 43 mph and hold 31 mph for hours, with more endurance than any modern racehorse. But they bite, kick, and can't be trained. So Sumerians made a hybrid called a kunga, which kept the speed and dropped the temper. A kunga cost 40 times a donkey. It couldn't breed, so every generation had to be made fresh. These pulled the war wagons shown on the Standard of Ur, a Sumerian mosaic from 2500 BCE. It's the first known case of humans creating a new animal. Zebras are the longest-running failure. Romans raced them in chariots during the emperor Caracalla's reign, around 200 AD. The Dutch tried in the 1700s. Walter Rothschild even drove a zebra carriage up to Buckingham Palace in the 1890s to prove the point. Germans gave it a shot in colonial East Africa. None of it worked. Zebras dodge lassos with a quick ducking reflex, have no hierarchy you can slot into, and have spent millions of years evolving alongside lions. A single kick can break a lion's jaw. Jared Diamond ran the math on this. Out of roughly 148 large mammal species humans could have tamed, only 14 ever worked. The animal has to pass six separate tests: eat flexibly, grow fast, breed in a pen, stay calm, not spook easily, and follow a pack order. Miss one and the whole thing collapses. The earliest confirmed horse riders were the Yamnaya, a nomadic steppe people from north of the Black Sea. They left behind skeletons showing the specific hip damage and healed fall injuries you see in modern riders. Out of 156 adult skeletons studied, only 24 had the pattern. Even inside a horse-riding culture, most people still walked.

Democrat governor says enforcing the law and putting criminals in jail helped slash violent crime by “nearly 50%” in his state. Imagine that. WES MOORE: “You want to make communities and families like mine less safe? Oh, we’re going to get you, and you’re NOT going to get out.” “The last time the homicide rate was this low in Baltimore City, I wasn’t born yet… We did not increase the severity of the punishment. We increased the PROBABILITY.” “We said, ‘You will be held to account,’ and it has worked better and faster than anywhere else in the entire country.”

Socialism is the flat earth theory of economics.

NYC is proving that shoplifting is a simple repeat-offender problem. And an easily solvable one. Shoplifting increased 64% from 2019 to 2023. It was the same 300 people committing a third of the shoplifting in the city. But only a small portion of retail complaints led to arrests, so retailers stopped calling police and just put their deodorant behind plexiglass, or have you press a button and wait four minutes to buy toothpaste. It's been stupid. Now the city and state are going after those repeat offenders with a few key tactics: 1) The state now lets prosecutors aggregate thefts across incidents, so five $200 shoplifts from the same Rite Aid becomes a serious felony, not misdemeanor slaps. 2) NYPD started banning serial shoplifters from stores with trespass affidavits so they prosecutors can stack charges when they came back 3) NYPD used data to put foot patrols in commercial corridors and officers at subway stops shoplifters used as escape routes. 4) NYPD encouraged retailers to call them about the thieves who show up everyday to steal small stuff, and then they followed through with arrests. Thanks to these measures, retail theft is down 20% in the first quarter of 2026, with double-digit declines in every borough. And the recidivism rate dropped from 20% to 13%. The NYC economy was hemorrhaging $4.4 billion a year to shoplifting. They're now reversing it pretty cheaply, just by tracking repeat offenders, arresting them, and upgrading their charges to make it easier for prosecutors to punish them.

⚡ The woman in that photo is being used as a political prop by the NYT and she probably doesn't even know it. The framing wants you to feel outrage at the cruelty of the cuts. But the actual data point buried in the story is devastating to the narrative it's trying to build. 272k for a senior VP at a USAID-funded nonprofit is not a real salary. It's a subsidy. That job existed inside a closed loop: taxpayer money flows to USAID, USAID funds NGOs, NGOs hire professionals at inflated rates, those professionals build lives around compensation that was never stress-tested against the open market. The entire salary was a function of proximity to the spigot. Not output. Not value creation. Not demand for her specific skills. The $19/hour number isn't the system being cruel. It's the system being honest for the first time. The market is saying: without the government funding stream, your skills at 57 command 39k. That's the real price. The 272k was the fiction. And here's what nobody in that thread will say: there are tens of thousands of people in the DC metro area alone sitting in exactly this position right now. Government-adjacent professionals whose entire compensation structure was built on a funding model that is being unwound. Not by AI, not by automation, but by simple political reallocation. And the market is going to reprice every single one of them. The deeper pattern is that an entire class of professional jobs in America were never real market jobs. They were artifacts of institutional spending that created its own employment ecosystem. Government, corporate middle management, DEI departments, compliance layers, consulting firms that exist to service other consulting firms. The whole structure was a series of jobs that existed because the money existed, not because the work needed doing at that price. That structure is now being compressed from multiple directions simultaneously. AI from one side. Spending cuts from another. Corporate efficiency mandates from a third. And the professional class that built its identity, its mortgages, its kids' tuitions, its retirement plans around those salaries is about to discover what the open market actually thinks they're worth. That's the repricing. This woman is just the first photo to go viral.

Quillette Founder, Claire Lehmann (@clairlemon), explains that many people now follow a moral framework in which the oppressed can never be guilty.

When Zohran Mamdani says Muhammad was “an immigrant,” he’s not technically lying. He’s just cutting the story off right before it gets inconvenient. Yeah - Muhammad migrated to Medina in 622. That part’s real. What they don’t tell you is what happened next. He didn’t walk into an empty city. Medina was a multi-tribal society with significant Jewish populations - established, structured, and already running things economically and politically. There was an agreement - the Constitution of Medina - where different groups, including Jews and Muslims, were supposed to coexist under mutual obligations. Sounds like the “diversity works” narrative, right? Give it five years. One Jewish tribe? Expelled. Second tribe? Expelled. Third tribe? Surrounded, surrendered… then the men executed and the women and children enslaved. That’s not fringe history. That’s coming straight out of early Islamic sources - the same ones scholars, Islamic and non-Islamic, have studied for centuries. And that’s the part people like Mamdani conveniently skip. Because if you include that, the framing changes. It’s no longer just “immigrant seeking refuge.” It becomes: enter → consolidate → eliminate opposition. We have to call out selective storytelling. Because when politicians cherry-pick history to push a modern agenda, they’re not educating you - they’re managing you. They give you the soft-focus version: “Refugee. Inclusion. Coexistence.” They leave out: Power. Conflict. Consequences. And if you don’t know the full timeline, you’re arguing blind. So don’t just accept the headline they hand you. Read the whole story. And don't forget the part that involved the Jews so you can understand what's going on between Israel and the Muslim world.

The organization is the Citizens Network for Foreign Affairs. Here's their 2024 expenses. $28 million on salary + benefits (for 100 employees) $12 million on subcontractors $3 million on travel $5 million on consultants $9 million on other Only $4 million on grants

C.S. Lewis on why it is difficult to discuss Christianity: "When He created the vegetable world He knew already what dreams the annual death and resurrection of the corn would cause one to stir in pious Pagan minds, He knew already that He Himself must so die and live again and in what sense, including and far transcending the old religion of the Corn King. He would say "This is my Body." Common bread, miraculous bread, sacramental bread—these three are distinct, but not to be separated. Divine reality is like a fugue. All His acts are different, but they all rhyme or echo to one another. It is this that makes Christianity so difficult to talk about. Fix your mind on any one story or any one doctrine and it becomes at once a magnet to which truth and glory come rushing from all levels of being." - C.S. Lewis, Miracles

The CBS News segment on SPLC defrauding its donors and paying hate groups is wild. “The SPLC was not dismantling these groups. It was instead manufacturing the extremism it purports to oppose.” Great reporting!

Once upon a time the NYT may have featured American factory workers cleaned out by global trade policies (“sad but ‘inevitable’”), but now we are supposed to feel bad for senior VPs at non-profits having to join the ranks of the commoners to make ends meet.

NYT frames this as if USAID employees had a quasi-property right to high-paying, taxpayer-funded jobs. In reality, this tells a darker story—we spent half-a-century debt-financing a managerial class of Leftists whose only qualifications were ideological.

Julius Nyerere sold Tanzania on gentle “Ujamaa” African socialism—a softer vision of communal brotherhood rooted in mythical African tradition. In practice it led to Operation Vijiji: the 1973-76 forced march of over 13 million peasants (~95% of the rural population) into collective villages, often at gunpoint by army, police, and party militias who moved people like cattle in the dead of night. Homes were torched to prevent return. Ancestral plots were abandoned overnight. Traditional knowledge of local soils, seasons, and crops were discarded for half-baked Marxist theories that saw farmers as interchangeable cogs in a state machine. Agricultural output swiftly collapsed. Cash-crop exports halved within a decade, food imports exploded from 50,000 tons in 1970 to 400,000 by 1974, and once self-sufficient villages faced shortages while the Party preached self-reliance from Dar es Salaam. Fertile land became dust under central planning. The philosopher-president’s paradise delivered only death, dependency, and a generation that learned the hard way that socialism is just a synonym for starvation. Julius Nyerere’s gentle “Ujamaa” socialism was nothing new. It was the same blueprint for mass murder the world had seen before, in a Gandhi Peace Prize-winning smile.