Ifan Morgan Jones

The Trump regime should beware picking a fight with the Pope

Top concern for almost every group was the cost of living and it making life too difficult for people, not just sapping joy but making things generally miserable and the sense they would ‘never get off the hamster wheel’ with ‘no light at the end of the tunnel’ a

🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿“I want to wake up & not have to worry & go to sleep without having to worry” Spent the weekend in focus groups across south Wales from Cardiff to Merthyr, to Port Talbot & Pembroke Dock, above all else we heard deep pessimism about the state of Wales, the UK & the wider world

Here’s a secret that every genuinely original thinker knows: there are no original ideas. there are only original combinations. Every “breakthrough” is two existing ideas from different domains meeting for the first time inside someone’s head. The person who reads only within their field will only ever have ideas that their field has already had. This is why the most interesting people are almost always polymaths. Go wider. Read the thing that has nothing to do with your work. Talk to the person who has nothing in common with you. Visit the place that makes no sense on your itinerary. The irrelevant input is the one that will combine with everything else and produce something nobody’s ever seen.

TRUMP: EFFECTIVE IMMEDIATELY, UNITED STATES NAVY WILL BEGIN PROCESS OF BLOCKADING ANY AND ALL SHIPS TRYING TO ENTER, OR LEAVE, STRAIT OF HORMUZ.

Europoor is an entirely accurate phrase. America is simply in a different league.

50 years ago today, All the President’s Men (1976) was released. Still arguably the greatest film about investigative journalism and political thrillers.

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.