Mimsy Were the Borogoves

The best time to start reading Mark Steyn was twenty sod-bollicking years ago. The second best time to start reading Mark Steyn is right now.

The best in music, literature, current events, and civilizational collapse.

Google has come a long way from when I wrote my last post about Google and ads back in 2007. At that time Google had only recently acquired YouTube. Nearly twenty years on, I now watch a lot of YouTube videos. Three days a week I spend an hour and a half on the treadmill, watching nothing but videos on an Apple TV. I start with my YouTube watchlist and only move on to what I’ve recorded on my DVR after my watchlist is empty. Given all of the wonderful vintage cooking, history, and science shows on YouTube, this rarely happens.

I’ve been doing this now for over half a decade, which means that Google has massive amounts of information about what videos I watch, how I watch them, what ads I watch, what ads I skip, and when I skip them.

And yet they still can’t tell what I might be interested in, whether to buy or to learn more about. At best, they seem to be completely ignoring the very obvious data that they have on me. But more and more it seems as if they are deliberately showing me ads that they know I’m not going to watch—and that they know are going to convince me not to watch any subsequent ads in that ad block, too.

They know what videos I watch. They know I watch physics videos, space videos, vintage cooking videos, Apple videos, old movie videos, the making of movies, roleplaying games, unique firearms and medieval weapons, Italian news, history, music, vintage computers, and various combinations of the above.

You could probably sweep my very limited demographic by starting a channel focused on the history, food, and culture of the American west as depicted in spaghetti westerns. Especially if you made it on an iPhone and also talked about fiddly tech bits and illustrated your points with an old west roleplaying game managed by a TRS-80 Model I.

They have never seen me watch a video about dogs, cats, children, cleaning up messes, incontinence (it only now occurs to me to wonder if those two are related), or new cars.

They do, however, know that I often watch low-information-density videos—mainly videos by people who talk slowly—at +25% or even +50%. And yet they still show me ads that literally provide no information at all for the first five to ten seconds—or sometimes ever.

I have no idea what those ads are selling: I skip them when given the opportunity, and, when not given the opportunity, I turn my attention elsewhere.

During the 2024 Presidential campaign, when President Trump survived an assassination attempt by no more than a glance at a computer screen for data, turning his head just enough to avoid a bullet to the brain, there was a lot of talk about Divine Providence. President Trump’s miraculous survival is not, however, the first time that the nation buzzed with the talk of Divine intervention in the lives of former presidents.

The first four presidents. Two of them died on the Jubilee of the Declaration of Independence, July 4, 1826.

On July 4 we celebrate the Semiquincentennial anniversary of the Declaration of our Independence from Great Britain. Two hundred and fifty years have passed since the Declaration was adopted. John Adams predicted it would be celebrated with wild abandon… if it proved successful.

The 4th of July, 1776, will be a memorable epoch in the history of America. I am apt to believe it will be celebrated by succeeding generations, as the GREAT ANNIVERSARY FESTIVAL! It ought to be commemorated as the day of deliverance, by solemn acts of devotion to the Almighty God. It ought to be solemnized with pomp, shows, games, sports, guns, bells, bonfires and illuminations—from one end of the continent to the other, from this time forever!¹

Exactly two hundred years ago, fifty years after the Declaration, another momentous event rocked the country. Thomas Jefferson died in the afternoon, and John Adams in the evening. On the fiftieth anniversary, the Jubilee, of the document they had created, both died within hours of each other.

There were probably more orations after Independence Day than on the day itself, due to that amazing coincidence. As the news spread throughout our then-small country there were eulogies, commemorations, and the beginnings of legends. There were enough joint eulogies that at least one publisher announced a book collecting them. I collected two of them in A Sestercentennial Cookery: Edward Everett’s eulogy of August 1, 1826, and the semi-anonymous “Lady of Richmond’s” July 14 Lines on the Deaths of Thomas Jefferson and John Adams.

Beltway pundits like to ridicule Trump supporters for thinking he’s playing some sort of four dimensional chess when he clearly isn’t. Whether it’s the fight with Musk or ending Iran’s nuclear program, it’s all the same complaint: not only does President Trump not understand what he’s doing, his supporters think there’s a plan when there isn’t one, confusing random flailing with multi-dimensional strategy.

In fact, though, that’s not what I see most Trump supporters celebrating in Trump’s actions. Most Trump supporters appear to be grateful that the President plays mere two-dimensional or one-dimensional chess.¹

Most politicians and beltway pundits seem to be stuck in zero dimensional chess. When Trump announces some action in pursuance of some policy, such as that he’s going to raise tariffs against a country until that country decides to negotiate to reduce their tariffs against the United States, the beltway class yells that this is crazy.

And then when the President rolls those tariffs back when the country announces they’ll negotiate, the same crowd crows that Trump is walking back his actions, not that the actions resulted in the consequences the President desired.

The same thing happened only last week with Iran. Trump threatened Iran with specific consequences unless the Islamic leadership in Iran started negotiating, starting with a ceasefire in the Strait of Hormuz. The beltway class yelled that he’s crazy. Iranian leaders came to the table, so he stopped the threats that he explicitly said were meant to bring about this result and the beltway class crowed that he was chickening out. They didn’t argue that he shouldn’t trust the Iranian leadership—or that he shouldn’t trust the Pentagon—or that the starting point of negotiations offered was a bad one or even that the ceasefire was likely to be measured in hours rather than days. For that you need to go to someone on the right, someone who has actually supported Trump, such as Mark Steyn. No, they argued that he was chickening out when he did what he said he would do.

It’s literal zero-dimensional thinking. There is no sense that policies have goals and that reaching those goals will affect policy. When a politician literally announces the goal of an action, and the goal is met and so the action is ended, this is crazy and incomprehensible to beltway “thinkers”. Who, to paraphrase Edgar Rice Burroughs, “do more talking than thinking”.

“The comparison between the tactics of the Nazi storm troopers and our modern Antifa thugs is apt. It illustrates the time we now live in… the same unwillingness of decent Germans to believe the Nazis were a threat is the same unwillingness of too many modern Americans to believe the same thing about Antifa and the Democratic Party. Worse, we now have a large minority of Americans who support this violent behavior. To them, violence is wholly justified against those who disagree with them.”

“As he told us this story, what struck me was how similar my own experience has been. Time after time for the past four decades my liberal friends and relatives have refused to believe anything I say to them—always based on actual events—about politics and the growing corruption and bigotry within the Democratic Party. Like those decent Germans in the 1930s, these decent Americans find reasons to quickly dismiss what I say, without making any effort to find out if there is any merit to it…

“What I said was simply too unbelievable to be true, even though I had actually experienced it.”

“…the best part of free health care is that death is always free. And fast. While it may take months to see a specialist, ‘the median wait time between first request and referral was 1 day’ for Canada’s free death health care system. Beat that or die trying.”

“There’s no medical problem that free government health care can’t solve by killing you. For free.”

“Earlier this month, Fulton County admitted that approximately 315,000 early votes from the 2020 election were illegally certified but were nonetheless still included in the final results of that election.”

“Five years after the election—when it is too late to rectify the crime, and never mind all the injury inflicted on those branded ‘election deniers’ for protesting this fraud—we learn the truth… Here you have more than 300,000 ballots illegally included in the tally, which is nearly 30 times more than Biden’s margin of (alleged) victory in Georgia.”