Will a judge—any judge, for any judge can—send Trump to jail before the election? Maybe. Polymarket puts the probability at 15%. I feel like this may be a good bet. (What would be amazing would be to run the debate over the jail’s visitor phone.)

Will this outrage make Trumpists rise up, mob up, pry their Führer from Epstein’s cell, shred any human being in their way, and seat him on an Oval Office throne of blood? (At least an Aeron chair of blood—Trump’s back, like mine, isn’t getting any younger.) Lol. Did anyone… did anyone even protest his trial? Lol.

Charlottesville and January 6 were the last lame breaths of what John Adams called “mobocracy” in America. Just as monarchy cannot exist when the king is five years old, mobocracy—that is,
revolutionary democracy—cannot exist when the “mob” just wants to grill.

The secular has its origin in man's loss of spiritual vision or — what is the same thing — in the hard­ening of his heart; and the contraction of the world of nature to a self-contained entity, which is what happens when we ignore its sacred aspect, represents not so much a closing off of nature itself as a closing of our own eyes. We always have to remember that how we see the world about us is but a reflection of the state of our own inner world. Ultimately it is because we see ourselves as existing apart from God that we also see nature as existing apart from God.

This last statement is to the point here because what the modern scientific outlook and the building of our modern tech­nological and economic order demonstrate is the triumph of precisely the view in which the world is seen as a self-contained entity, existing in its own right, apart from God, and conse­quently as something that man is quite entitled to explore, organize and exploit without any reference to the divine. As we have seen, the modern secular world owes its immediate origin not so much to the Renaissance and Reformation or to Copernicus and Galileo as to the scientific revolution of the sev­enteenth century, with its ‘New Philosophy’, as the scientists of the seventeenth century themselves called it.

Their chief finding is a striking association between population density — the concentration of people in a given area — and happiness. When the researchers ranked all 1,215 communities by average happiness, they found that average population density in the 20 percent most miserable communities was more than eight times greater than in the happiest 20 percent of communities.

...

So what makes the happiest communities different from all the rest? Aside from fewer people, the authors found that the happiest communities had shorter commute times and less expensive housing, and that a smaller share of the population was foreign-born. They also found that people in the happiest communities are less transient than in the least happy communities, that they are more likely to attend church and that they are significantly more likely to feel a “sense of belonging” in their communities.

...

Perhaps even more surprising are the factors that don't appear to play a major role in community-level differences in happiness: average income levels and rates of unemployment and education. People may move to cities for good-paying jobs, but the Canadian study strongly suggests it's not making them any happier.

And no, I ain't rich,
If you wanted to know
But I got big banks
And they're made of snow

Tryin'a get dat green,
Cuttin' trees, planting more of 'em.