Joseph Raymond McCarthy was a United States Senator from Wisconsin who rose to national prominence in the early 1950s because he dared to confront a reality that much of the American establishment preferred to ignore.

He believed communism was not merely a foreign threat but an internal one.

McCarthy understood that America’s adversaries did not always arrive in military uniforms or foreign armies. Sometimes they arrived through institutions, ideas, influence networks, and political movements that slowly reshaped public opinion and government policy from within.

His fight took place during one of the most dangerous periods in modern history.

Joseph Stalin controlled Eastern Europe behind the Iron Curtain.

Mao Zedong had consolidated communist rule over China.

The Soviet Union had successfully penetrated American institutions through espionage networks that reached into the highest levels of government.

Communist parties, front organizations, propagandists, and fellow travelers operated throughout the Western world.

[TTP:  This is the second of a three-part series we’re covering this week. If you missed the first part, go here. We’ll pick up right where we left off yesterday.]

While there is little discussion of the practical impossibility of switching to alternatives to fossil fuels today, discussions focusing on exaggerated claims of climate change have made most people aware of the costs of using fossil fuels.

But many fewer people are aware of the staggeringly large benefits fossil fuels have brought and continue to bring to humanity.

[TTP:  This is the first of a three-part series we’ll cover this week. The original article was too long to post all at once, but too good to merely summarize.]

It’s important to understand that fossil fuels are today, and will continue to be for many decades to come, the essential foundation for civilization as we know it in the world today.

We should first note how the fossil fuels we get from the ground were made. As Brian Villmoare writes in The Evolution of Everything: The Patterns and Causes of Big History:

[P]lants use the stored chemical energy [which they get from the sun through photosynthesis] to grow. But when animals eat those plants, they are acquiring that same stored energy, which they then convert to growth, or store as fat.

If a predator eats an animal, that same energy is passed down to the predator. So, in effect, when a lion eats an impala it is eating an animal that is stored solar energy, only in chemical form.

Humans access this same solar energy when they eat plants or animals, or burn logs for warmth. But what about other forms of energy?

When we burn gasoline in our cars, we are using that exact same solar energy.

Hundreds of millions to billions of years ago, giant mats of cyanobacteria and other organisms covered the Earth’s oceans. When they died and were buried beneath the ocean floor, over time that plant material decayed and slowly converted into what we call crude oil.

A similar process occurs during coal formation, when plant matter is buried and decays over millions of years. In both cases, the product we burn is a stored accumulation of millions of years of solar energy, converted into a chemical form via photosynthesis.

The only form of chemical energy on Earth that is not the result of photosynthesis is nuclear energy.

[TTP: This article is a deep dive. It will take about 15 minutes to read.

And it is worth every minute!]

Yes, this administration has a plan.

Yes, there is going to be a reset to the global financial system.

Yes, it is already being executed.

No, it is probably nothing like what you think.

Over the last fifteen months, a series of seemingly unrelated moves, tariffs, military operations, legislation, regulatory shifts, defense pacts, have been playing out across different theatres at the same time.

Most people are watching each one in isolation.

The tariff people are talking about tariffs. The military people are talking about Iran. The crypto people are talking about stablecoins. The economists are still saying so much but nothing at all. Almost nobody is connecting them.

This article aims to connect them. What follows is the full picture of what is actually being built, how each piece locks into the next, and why the result is a new global financial architecture that will define the next fifty years of American power. By the end, you may gain clarity on something that most of the world has not figured out yet.

[TTP: Today’s articles were chosen specifically to show the results of thinking rationally and the refusal to do so.]

The deepest mind of the modern age sat in a lecture hall and admitted that a priest had out-thought him regarding the beginning of the world.

This is the story of how thinking all the way to the end stops looking like an argument and starts looking like awe.

In January of 1933, in a packed hall at Caltech, Albert Einstein listened to a Belgian priest explain how the universe began, and then he stood up in front of a room full of physicists and said it was the most beautiful explanation of creation he had ever heard.

This was not a man easily impressed, and it was not a conclusion he had wanted to reach.

A few years earlier Einstein had told the same priest, to his face, that his mathematics were fine but his physics were abominable. The idea offended him.

The priest, Georges Lemaître, was arguing that the universe was not the eternal, static, always-having-existed thing that every serious scientist assumed it to be.

He was arguing that it had a beginning. That if you ran the expansion of the galaxies backward far enough, everything collapsed to a single dense point, a moment before which there was no before.

Lemaître called it, with a poet’s ear, a day without yesterday.

Einstein hated it, and the reason he hated it is the most revealing part of the whole story.

[TTP: Today’s articles were chosen specifically to show the results of thinking rationally and the refusal to do so.]

Every day, thousands of Los Angelenos take a deep breath, step out of their houses, and plunge themselves into a transit experience straight out of Mad Max. The city’s buses have become rolling homeless shelters, replete with drugs and feces.

Its trains are home to murder and mayhem. As Daquan, a daily rider who works near the North Hollywood station told us, “You could kill somebody down there and just get away with it.”

The transformation has been swift and stark. Between 2020 and 2025, crime in the system more than doubled.

What drove the change? L.A. Metro’s dedication to creating an equitable transit system, where all Angelenos—drug-addicted, homicidal maniacs included—can effectively ride free, without consequences.

In other words, Angelenos have been condemned to die underground, all in the name of racial justice.

Activists and their allies in city government have spent years laser-focused on driving cops from the L.A. Metro’s buses and trains. Their argument: making people pay to use the trains is racist.