Book Bear 🐻

Let me explain the dangers of government-controlled digital currencies (for the benefit of our small-brained European cousins). Suppose you went to the liquor store last week and bought €100 worth of booze using the government-run digital currency on your iPhone. Today you went to the liquor store again and tried to buy €100 worth of booze using the government-run digital currency on your iPhone, but your transaction gets rejected. Why? Because some Eurotrash EU bureaucrat decided that it's unhealthy for you to buy so much liquor in such a short period of time, so you gets nothing. And you have no recourse, because you have become a serf whose life is at the discretion of the government. (As an aside, single-payer, government-funded healthcare will work in synchronicity with this, deciding what is best for you health-wise, because after all it's not fair that other citizens must pay for your cirrhosis and bad judgment.) You have been warned, Europe.

I traveled to Ukraine to interview President Zelensky. Part 1 of our conversation drops tomorrow on The Ben Shapiro Show.

Sweden is building a road that recharges electric vehicles while they drive over it. 🚗⚡

The NYT this morning criticized Elon Musk's call to impeach federal judges, accusing him of violating constitutional norms. Well, I looked into the data and it's insane: We stopped impeaching federal judges, despite having more of them now than ever! The impeachment rate now seems implausibly low. Either federal judges have become saints, or something is suppressing impeachments. What is the probability we'd observe zero impeachments from 2011-2024? Using the Poisson distribution, I think it's somewhere around 3-7% depending on how you do it. So it's very fishy. What's even crazier is that there is a clear political story behind all of this. The 1980 Judicial Conduct and Disability Act, signed by Jimmy Carter, gave judges the power to police themselves through an obfuscated multi-layer system where chief judges dismiss almost all the complaints and judicial councils choose confidential sanctions in most of the cases where they even admit wrongdoing occurred. Then in 2008 the federal judges "reformed" themselves, which seems to have made things even worse. I have to look into this more, obviously a complicated issue. But it seems that the NYT is wrong and Musk is right, we do need to impeach more federal judges. (I'll post a longer piece on this later.)