thisisniallferguson

The strange truth about the Illuminati. After all the crazy conspiracy theories, it was really gripping to read about this weird little South German sect of radical Enlightenment thinkers in the 1770s who thought they could infiltrate the Freemasons and undermine Roman Catholicism.

No, the bubble was last year. I said last year that the floor when the bubble burst would be around $10,000, and that's where it is. I think it hovers there for a while. I don't think it goes to zero. I bought a small amount at $10,000 just to test that hypothesis. My 18-year-old son was a buyer at $350. He's smarter than me about crypto.

After reading Andrew Sullivan on the opioid crisis (in New York magazine this week), I almost feel like saying "Yes." I'm also depressed by the lunacy of intersectionality and intolerance on campuses, which is now seeping into the workplace. The only consolation is that the Western civilization has come through rougher patches than this.

If you're even slightly right-leaning, keep it secret until you have tenure. These days the degree of ideological conformism is even worse than it was in the 1980s, when I was starting out. Then there were still Tory dons at Oxford and Cambridge, whose support was vital to me: notably Norman Stone, Jack Plumb and Maurice Cowling, as well as Jeremy Catto. That was a wonderful network, as they were both brilliant and fun.

Yes: Buckley conservatives and Evangelicals risk real contamination from the association with Trump. He's as unprincipled a human being as has ever entered American political life. If he fails, the damage could be generational. Yet there's no certainty that he'll fail. And if he succeeds with the economy and foreign policy -- which I don't rule out -- then the Republican party will find it very hard to disavow him. And those who argued "Anyone who can beat Clinton" will be vindicated. I take Maurice Cowling's view of politics, that at the highest level it's only subliminally about ideology. Trump's real significance is that he's a wrecking ball directed against the established liberal hierarchy in DC.