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Notes -
A number of stories I vaguely follow have largely been ignored by this space. To start discussion:
Ukraine
Back in November, there was discussion about the imminent fall of Pokrovsk, encirclement of Ukrainian troops and collapse of the frontline:
It seems like the capeshit arc rages on, and yet another prediction of Ukrainian (or Russian, for that matter) collapse goes in the dustbin. Deepstatemap shows the UA holding onto a corner of Pokrovsk, the ISW map doesn't seem to have moved significantly, there haven't been any MSM news articles on Pokrovsk since December (?!), Russian economic collapse seems yet to materialize. Does anyone have more insight?
Measles makes a comeback in the US - who wants some lockdowns?
2025 recorded ~2500 measles cases in the US, and 733 recorded so far in 2026. This is the highest number of cases since about 1990, and for the 90s/2000s we saw low double-digit numbers of cases. A handful of children have died. Solely based on the numbers, I think you'd expect a case or two of encephalitis but I'm unsure. The biggest outbreaks are in Spartanburg county, South Carolina (Trump - 66% of the vote), Gaines county, Texas (Trump won 91% of the vote) and Mohave county, Arizona (Trump won 77% of the vote). As far as I can tell, there are no real cities in any of these counties. We're seeing a remarkable inversion where historically infectious disease outbreaks would start in the cities and people would flee to the suburbs/countryside. Maybe my next startup idea should be a chain of sanatoriums (sanatoria?) in NYC or SF.
Trans identification decreasing?
Several months late to the party, but in October a study came out suggesting the number of trans students applying to Brown had roughly halved, yoy. I suppose it's early to be declaring victory given that the data/methodology don't seem particularly rock-solid, but I'm definitely chalking it as evidence supporting my claim that there is a hardcore group of genuinely trans people, while the significant increases were rebellious teens and some better way to rebel will crop up to replace it. At the least, it's evidence that the doomers and blackpillers claiming lines go up are wrong.
Anecdotally, I've heard gen Z college students get off on being offensive. In 15-20 years Millenials will be even more deeply uncool and taking the place of boomers, while the alphas and betas rebel and move leftwards to areas we can't even imagine (but get ready for AI girlfriends. They'll be called AI-Attracted Individuals, and I'm planting a flag in the AIAI acronym right now).
Poopgate
In the most momentous news since Biden fell off a bike, leftist social media has been circulating a Forbes video claiming to show Trump soiling himself at the 0:34 mark (you'll have to find it on youtube yourself, sorry - and turn up your audio). We've now been blessed with Yahoo News' headline 'No credible evidence Trump pooped himself during executive order signing', which is interesting given the video that millions of people have watched.
It will be interesting watching Trump's mental faculties evolve over the next three years. Biden was notably sharper in 2020 than in his disastrous 2024 debate performance. Presumably Trump won't tolerate handlers the same way Biden did, so it seems like a situation that could rapidly dissolve into a ahem shitshow.
In 1964 there were 458,000 measles cases, and 421 deaths, over a smaller population, no lockdowns. Lockdowns are just a bad idea.
As far as I can tell, the outbreak is mostly among religious communities who have low vaccination rates (though apparently not actually for religious reasons). There has been a small general drop in vaccination, but it's not clear if it has had a significant effect. The general drop you can blame on government overreaction to COVID.
How barbaric. Our ancestors were truly uncivilized.
It's...not? I mean, I guess I don't have healthcare records for every measles patient, but are you genuinely going to make the argument that a nearly 100x increase in measles cases, centered around political strongholds for the vaccine-skeptical party and away from population centers, is due to some other factor? What would that be?
No, I think I'll blame the people who choose to not get vaccinated instead. Unless you'd like to make the argument that vaccine-skeptics lack the mental capacity to be assigned agency?
I wouldn't go quite so far but it's just open-and-shut correct that many people can't properly evaluate the things that we use to establish the safety of vaccines, like randomized trials. Add in the possibility of fraud/bias (which is a legitimate concern in academia and science) and that almost certainly rises from "many" to "most." Can you sit down and read an RCT and determine if it has fraudulent data?
Thus people have to fall back on cruder heuristics such as "do I trust this institution." Keeping that trust is part of the institution. And, well, if an institution explodes its institutional trust it's pretty fair to assign at least some of the blame for the resulting fire to the institution for deceiving people.
Not if they just make up or fudge the numbers. In my field I can catch most of the bullshit that isn't outright lying. If it's far enough outside my wheelhouse, almost certainly not.
When half the country is panicking and wants lockdowns, and half the country is enraged and fedposting about civil liberties, how exactly is an institution supposed to maintain credibility with the entire population? If Fauci had noped out day one and been replaced by a COVID mega-dove, you still would have burned credibility with half the country. We'd just be having this conversation with inverse valence.
I maintain that:
The same two things every technical expert wanting to preserve their credibility should do:
They violated the first by making a lot of confident claims that later turned out to be incorrect. They violated the second by advocating for the implementation of a bunch of specific solutions which had non-medical trade-offs.
If they'd done neither and kept to relatively generic advice and a little bit of carefully-phrased speculation they might get criticism for being useless but would have avoided much of the trust loss from saying wrong things. I think you would have also seen much less aggressive fights over lockdowns and masking without The Science pushing specific solutions.
A lot of the credibility current institutions are burning came from past institutions getting things right. When they said that vaccinating everyone against measles would get rid of measles it actually did do so. The same was not so for the coronavirus.
Past institutions could just have been lucky, but I think a more sensible default assumption is that they got better results because they were better.
Problem is, most people don't distinguish between individual experts and instead just see the scientific community as a big undifferentiated blob. People who speak confidently and get political tend to get a lot more attention than people who don't do those things, so generally speaking it seems to me that such people will come to be very over-represented in the average person's idea of what "the science" is saying.
And this was something deliberately cultivated by the scientific community itself. During Covid there were credentialed experts coming out against lockdowns or MRNA vaccines, etc., and the response was that it's the scientific consensus that counts, not individual opinions.
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