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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.
Poopgate is just the natural result of the claims that Trump wears suit jackets with large tails so he can hide evidence of soiling himself. The story was, and is, that he's not just Evil, he's also dementia-riddled and hence losing control of his bowels.
If you really want a selection of Youtube videos of the clickbait form where "medical experts" diagnose all the ailments Trump suffers from "look at the colour of this skin patch on his hand", the algorithm will happily serve them up even if you don't go looking for them. I'm not interested in Poopgate or any of these.
Though I do note how you wove in that last sentence about Trump's mental faculties: are you claiming the Poopgate et al. videos are true, or is it simply a case of "who cares if they're true, so long as the stick beats the dog?"
Regarding what future generations will be doing, it's as likely that they will move hard rightwards as hard leftwards. Millennials are the tolerant generation, so yeah a reaction against all the Coexist and QUILTBAG stuff is likely in the kids/grandkids, but that could be severely socially conservative as much as 'seize the means of production cottagecore Communism'.
Your point about measles outbreaks is interesting, I would ask what those areas have in common besides being rural. Looking at your linked map, for instance, there's an odd clustering on the Connecticut/New York state border. And the areas with low immunisation include New York state, whereas West Virginia has high immunisation coverage. Minnesota, that impeccably Blue state, also has low coverage. So "voted for Trump" does not seem to be correlation, much less cause.
You might indeed do well with a chain of sanatoria in NY, given the low immunisation coverage!
Yet this BBC report tells me "The measles vaccination rate for school-aged children is about 90% in Spartanburg County, the epicentre of the outbreak." So if kids are being vaccinated, what is behind the outbreak? This story tells me:
Okay, but are these any people in particular, or from all demographics in the population? It's sounding like adult cases, not children, though again, there's an outbreak at a school:
Okay, so again I ask: who are these people?
So, uh, let's blame those Ukrainian Mennonite Mormon Trump voters?
Makes sense to me. Anti-vaccination tendencies, as far as I can tell, are prevalent among middle-class suburban wine moms, especially the ones that are natural medicine nerds, and that demographic is largely Blue-coded. I imagine they are also prevalent among all minority groups, religious or otherwise, that are characterized by a general distrust of state authority. Average, run-of-the-mill working class people, on the other hand, such as a big segment of the West Virginian population, only rarely adopt such views, because their attitudes towards healthcare, and pretty much everything else, are inherently practical.
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