[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.

[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.

Quietly, and with no great fanfare, President Donald Trump has resurrected the most innovative strategy of his first term.

In fact, I’ve argued that this one measure is the single most creative approach to government reform to advance in a century.

Trump’s executive order creates a new category for federal employment, set to apply to any civil servant who is working on policy and its implementation. It’s a resurrection of a similar executive order from late in his first term — promptly reversed by President Joe Biden — and the finalization of another announced in the earliest days of Trump’s second term.

What this means is rather dramatic. It brings the public sector, or at least part of it, to fit with the usual labor practices of the private sector.

This helps restore some part of people’s government. The people elect a president. The president can control employment in the executive branch rather than be beholden to a permanent civil service class.

This is precisely what the Founders created. It’s something of a wonder how and why that system was ever replaced with something so completely different.

[TTP:  This is a long article, but the information is critical.]

It’s a typical afternoon in Saint-Denis, the narrow streets packed with people whose faces you cannot see.

The women move in niqab, shapes without features, eyes that do not meet yours.

The shop signs are in Arabic, the smell of cumin and lamb fat rises from every doorway, thick and permanent, as if the street itself has been marinated in another world.

From three directions at once, the call to prayer cuts through the air. Al-lahu Akbar. God is great. Come to prayer. Come to salvation.

Even the French police do not enter without backup. Ambulances request escorts before responding to calls. In the lost territories of Marseille, law enforcement officers disguise themselves as Muslims before making arrests.

France’s own intelligence service has mapped 150 such districts across the country. A former senior official of French foreign intelligence put it in numbers: these enclaves exist in 859 cities, and four million people — six percent of France’s entire population — live inside them.

There was a time when Paris was the most romantic city in the world. You could stop on the banks of the Seine at dusk, buy a baguette and a bottle of wine from the corner shop, sit on the stone steps above the water, and feel, without irony, that life was generous, and civilization was real.

The light on the river. The smell of bread. The sound of French — that particular music of a language that assumes beauty is worth the effort.

That Paris is gone. This is the story of how it fell.

This is the story of the fall of France.