Watch it.

Carl Benjamin (Sargon of Akkad) has some inconvenient truth for Republicans.

Tim Pool has an interesting and (in some ways) persuasive take on what just happened.

Highly recommended.

“You can vote your way into socialism, but you have to shoot your way out.”

Read it.

Picture a baby named Leslie, Kelly, or Ashley, and you’ll probably picture a girl. But all three names were once given mostly to boys. Looking at US baby names from 1936 to 2025, we found that 42 shifted from mostly boys to mostly girls, while just 12 went the other way. Explore the charts below to see how each name changed and what drove the shifts in each direction.

It has been my experience that a lot of upper-class (and wannabes) give both male and female offspring last names as first names—as in the above Leslie, Kelly, and Ashley. When I was at Yale, the President was Kingman Brewster, and his most famous recent predecessor was Whitney Griswold. We went to sweat at the Payne Whitney Gymnasium. Endicott Peabody was a famous headmaster at Groton. Think of Princeton alum Brooke Shields.

The War Zone.

At least one AeroVironment LOCUST laser counter-drone system is part of the array of anti-air defenses that have popped up around President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida, in recent weeks. Versions of LOCUST have been seeing steadily increasing use within the U.S. military in recent years, including deployments now along the border with Mexico. Though there has been much progress in the development of practical laser directed-energy weapons in recent years, the technology has continued to face hurdles to more widespread adoption.

Read it.

Since March 17, 2026, the federal government has implemented a months-long Jones Act waiver. This waiver allows foreign-flagged vessels to transport specified cargo between U.S. ports, easing shipping disruptions caused by the Iran conflict. As such, the waiver offers an opportunity to examine the Jones Act’s effectiveness in safeguarding and growing American shipping using recent shipping data.

Under federal law, two primary pathways exist for obtaining a Jones Act waiver. First, the secretary of war may request a waiver when it is necessary to address an immediate adverse effect on military operations, while certifying to Congress that qualified U.S.-flagged vessels are unavailable to meet the need. Second, the president may determine that a waiver is necessary in the interest of national defense, but only after the maritime administrator finds that sufficient Jones Act-qualified vessels are not available.

Jones Act waivers have been used most often during natural disasters like Hurricane Katrina, which caused significant loss of life and destruction.

Maritime industry groups have argued that the extended waiver has displaced U.S.-flag vessels and harmed American maritime employment. However, the Kirby Corporation, the only publicly traded Jones Act operator to discuss the effect directly with investors, panned the waiver’s impact.

“We haven’t really seen a big impact for Kirby,” explained Kirby CEO David Grzebinski, in the company’s second quarter 2026 earnings call. “We have heard of a couple participants losing some contracts because of non-Jones Act equipment. So far, it’s benign,”

The number of ‘U.S. flag vessels’ in world maritime commerce is vanishingly small, chiefly due to the Jones Act.

Read it.

Bill Kristol is not the only guy who can stab his own side in the back.

UPDATE: Some House Dems are now pushing to kick Haley Stevens out of their caucus (Meredith Lee Hill/Politico)

UPDATE: Haley Stevens’ staff and colleagues erupt at her “betrayal” (Andrew Solender/Axios)

Read it.

This is an interesting potential shift in energy position for the European Union. There has been zero investment by the EU nations in oil refining capacity. Simultaneously, Europe is now realizing they need diesel and jet fuel.

Gee, I gess we need those fossil fuels for a bit longer yet….

Happy Birthday to My Brother the Socialist.

Read it.

America has walked out of the UN climate racket. The rest of the world hasn’t gotten the message.

Next month, some 100,000 politicians, bureaucrats, functionaries, activists and other grifters will descend on Antalya, Turkey (COP folks prefer Türkiye) for COP31, the UN’s annual climate Conference of the Parties. They will fly in, talk endlessly, and enjoy the best hotels, food, beverages, and hospitality Recep Tayyip Erdo?an can offer. Then they’ll fly home having plotted how to pry trillions more out of whatever wealthy nations are still willing to pay.

Even now, after real-world scientific, energy, and economic realities have bashed the UN’s fraudulent science, garbage-in/garbage-out climate models, anti-fossil-fuel activism, and renewable energy fantasies, climate crisis assertions still dominate news cycles, policy, and spending.

Türkiye will serve as a “bridge” between developed and developing countries. Co-host Australia will push global “clean energy acceleration” — the very policies that are crippling its own citizens’ energy reliability, jobs, economy, and living standards.

Curtis Yarvin (Mencius Moldbug)

When you see clips of masked DHS goons hauling off some equally masked anarchist, you may be tempted to cheer. Don’t. Yes, charges will be filed. No, it will not harm the anarchist—it will make his day, his year, and maybe his life. All the money and power in the world will be at his defense. He will not even need to lift a finger to organize his own lawyers, much less pay them. In the end, as with many of the BLM rioters, he will probably be well compensated, with taxpayer funds, for his trouble. Not to mention all the pussy and/or dick s/he will, as a martyr, be entitled to! For the Islamist, this reward is only in heaven. But for the leftist it comes on earth.

…

One: there is no risk of a Republican one-party state, because there is no actual Republican party. It is a label, not a party. To the extent that the Republicans are organized, it is only for election theater. There is not even a remote, nascent equivalent of the venerable and gigantic progressive institutions which have been running our country for a century.

…

Two: it is not possible to remove the “Democrat judges,” etc, because there is no label sufficient to the purpose. Every time the Republicans attack a disposable label, I want to grind my teeth to powder and spit them out my nose. This is pure grift.

All that happens if you attack “woke,” “communist,” “politically correct,” etc, is that they stop saying these words. Then they label you as a rube who says these words. In biology, this is called “antigenic escape.” If you want to attack a word, take on a “conserved antigen,” like “progressive.” They have a lot of trouble not saying “progressive”—but they would probably manage.

Curtis Yarvin (Mencius Moldbug).

A self-driving computer is a computer which writes all its own apps. Every app is an agent which develops itself.

Sure you can download other peoples’ code. You can drive your own self-driving car. You don’t have to, though.

Like with agents now, if you know what you want your computer to do, just tell it what to do. But unlike with agents now, a self-driving computer doesn’t just do things. It makes tools that do things, then uses these tools. As you use your private computer, it becomes your universal tool.

If you ask for a task in the chat, the computer will do it. It may have to build a new tool. Next time, you can ask again. Or you can use the UI. You’re a customer base of one. Your computer has every feature you want and none you don’t. For the first time ever, it fits you.

Newsweek, a Voice of the Crust.

A nearly unprecedented number of Americans have voluntarily renounced their citizenship or relinquished their U.S. residency status since the start of the year.

A total of 4,574 names appeared on the Federal Register’s U.S. expatriation list over the first three quarters of the year, representing individuals whose loss of U.S. citizenship or long-term permanent resident status was reported to the Treasury Department. The latest quarterly update, issued on Thursday, shows that 1,331 names appeared on the register between July and September alone, although the number was down from 1,462 between January and March and 1,781 between April and June.

Despite this modest quarterly dip, it is clear when comparing these numbers to previous years that 2026 has seen an unusually high number of Americans renounce U.S. citizenship or give up their permanent residency.

Go Where You’re Treated Best.

Read it.

Before we analyze that, just remember certain data that’s not in dispute. The last three days, about 24 million barrels have left the Gulf’s exporting countries. In other words, they’re leaving through the Strait of Hormuz primarily at a level at or higher than during the period before the war, and they’re also leaving the Red Sea, and they’re also going out of the Strait of Oman.

The problem is not oil. It’s making up for the dearth of distillery. The distilleries in Russia have been hit by Ukraine. We don’t have enough in Western countries, so there’s a bottleneck on the refinement end, not on the supply.

We may have a kind of a short period where we have to catch up, but there is enough oil going out now, as much as there was in the pre-war. That suggests that this war is not going to affect oil prices into next year. It may have an effect on the midterms.

More importantly, though, we think that a strike is coming right after the midterms. We think that because Iran is preparing for it. They are trying to fortify their bunkers for the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps commanders. There are rumors they’re threatening us with new weapons. They promise to destroy the oil fields of the Gulf, all of this rhetoric. And [President] Donald Trump says he wants to end this war after the midterms.

That raises a lot of questions that we don’t have the answers to. We’ve been talking about how many drones and missiles, we can call them the numerator, that we have destroyed, but we’ve never really known the denominator, how many existing drones and missiles were in the Iranian fleet before the war started. And we’re finding out that they were preparing for years for this war, and all through the Iranian mountain ranges, there are bunkers with mobile launchers almost everywhere.

To be fair, it would solve the problem—although you’d have to wait a bit….

Quillette.

Last year, China recorded a goods trade surplus of US$1.2 trillion: a world record. The country staggers beneath perhaps history’s fastest-growing debt burden; meanwhile it faces the century’s largest absolute population loss (a projected 786 million people between 2024 and 2100—surely a figure without precedent). The ruling Communist Party boasts that its family-planning officials carried out 336 million abortions between 1971 and 2012. I could go on, selecting figures relating to culture, to the economy, to politics: each one of which is head-spinningly absurd.

This is what Napoleon meant when he is said to have warned of a sleeping lion that would one day wake to shake the world. He never foresaw the Communist Party, but he understood scale. In his day, of course, those numbers were still making little difference outside of China. The region was largely isolated (even the ancient Great Silk Road was mostly a modern fabrication), its sclerotic leaders forever freezing the people’s potential. Karl Marx observed a “giant empire … vegetating in the teeth of time.” When had it ever done anything else? Today, however, we live with the shocking historical anomaly of a globally interconnected Middle Kingdom. Now what happens in China matters to everyone.

And a totalitarian state can move at terrific speed. The People’s Republic conjures skyscrapers from the soil as if by magic, like some tremendous attempt to make up for China’s millennia of stasis. At the beginning of the pandemic, new hospitals sprang up in days. These scenes were reflective of the bigger picture: the PRC’s rise was one of the fastest in the historical record. Its fall could be similarly rapid. The combination of vast numbers and accelerated pace means the Chinese experience can show us our own future writ large: a bold-text, headline version of what will happen in the rest of the world; a vision seen in fast-forward.

Read it.

Certain myths survive from a period of trauma. They can be wholly incorrect and yet widely believed by nearly all living experts. The myth keeps moving from generation to generation and becomes doctrine, one which we dare not question for fear of contradicting the settled consensus. It so happens that “everyone knows” something that is entirely incorrect.

Read it.

It is a peculiar truth of our age that the most ancient of threats now wears the mask of progress. The air, once thick with the honest grime of industry, now carries a new and more insidious smog, a vapour of ideas which, if inhaled for long enough, breeds a profound and willing blindness. One detects its presence in the lecture halls, in the tweets of those paid by well-funded pressure groups, and in the green-tinged rhetoric that speaks of community while plotting the ruin of the very thing it purports to save.

Consider the proposition, now circulating with increasing boldness, that property is theft. It is a phrase of a certain theatrical simplicity, the sort that appeals to the intellectual whose only connection with the soil is the view from a train window or the curated wildness of a public park. The argument, as put forth by the Anarchist Communist Group and fellow-travellers in movements like the Common Weal, runs thus: that the distribution of land in Britain is a monstrous injustice, a relic of the Norman Conquest, and that the only path to justice is to hold the land in common. They point, with a sort of grim satisfaction, to the statistic that less than one percent of the population owns the lion’s share of the country. The image is conjured of a nation of Lords and Commoners, a feudal drama played out on grouse moors and in the shadow of unaffordable housing.

My goals:

1. Never go anywhere I haven’t already been.
2. Never talk to anybody I don’t already know.
3. Never eat anything I don’t already like.

Read it.

This dispute dates all the way back to 1958, when Congress, worried about juvenile delinquency in the aftermath of the then-scandalous movie “Rebel Without a Cause” (which involved a knife-fighting scene), passed the Federal Switchblade Act of 1958.

This act prohibits the knowing introduction, manufacture for introduction, transportation, or distribution into interstate commerce of any switchblade knife, which is defined as a knife that opens automatically by pressing a button or applying pressure to the handle or by inertia or gravity or both. Think of a butterfly knife.

Anyone who violated the act could be fined up to $2,000, imprisoned up to five years, or have both punishments applied.

Fast forward 66 years after Congress passed the Federal Switchblade Act, and a group of plaintiffs challenged the act’s provisions, arguing that they violate the Second Amendment, which broadly guarantees the right to “keep and bear Arms.”

Quillette.

By the late 1960s, physician, sailor and navigator David Lewis had become increasingly concerned that a remarkable body of human knowledge was in danger of disappearing forever. Across the Pacific, the last generation of traditional deep-sea navigators—whose orally transmitted knowledge allowed them to guide canoes across thousands of miles of ocean—were ageing and dying. Determined to record what they knew before it was lost, Lewis spent years sailing with these master mariners, attempting to understand how they navigated.

The result was We, the Navigators, first published in 1972. Drawing on his research among traditional sailors in Micronesia, Melanesia and Polynesia, Lewis documented in meticulous detail the techniques by which Pacific sailors found their way across the open seas without the charts and instruments of modern navigation. This landmark account of how a traditional knowledge system worked in practice also helped illuminate one of history’s great puzzles: how ancient peoples had crossed and settled an ocean covering almost a third of the Earth’s surface. In the decades since Lewis’s original research, archaeology, linguistics and, most recently, genetics have revealed ever more detail about this extraordinary feat.

Read it.

Chip Builder is a story-driven puzzle game about digital logic. Wire transistors into gates, gates into adders and memory, and memory into a working CPU you program yourself. Then take your design to the fab and make a real chip, design an AI accelerator, and finally run ChipCorp itself as its CEO.

If, of course, that’s what you want to do.

Check it out.

An interactive model of how electricity is made, moved, priced and kept at 60 Hz.

Babylon Bee.

Good luck with that.

Read it.

In an unsigned order, the justices paused Oct. 2 and Oct. 5 orders by U.S. District Judge Joseph Laplante, a George W. Bush appointee, that prevented the state from enforcing its restrictions on student IDs as a valid form of voter identification.

Justices cited past precedent, noting, “This Court has repeatedly emphasized that lower federal courts should ordinarily not alter the election rules on the eve of an election.”

They added, “Here, the District Court did not point to anything that would justify deviating from that principle.”

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson was the lone dissenter, writing, “Consequently, here, the District Court’s injunction was reasonably designed to address alleged misinformation, not to change the law.”

Read it.

October Surprise Season is back, right on schedule. The phenomenon is simple and well documented. Basically in the final weeks before a high-stakes election, an event, leak, crisis, or carefully timed disclosure appears that is meant to shift momentum, freeze the narrative, or force voters to reassess. The classic modern example remains 1980, when the Iran hostage crisis and the fear of a last minute Carter breakthrough gave the phrase its name. Bill Casey, running Reagan’s campaign, used the term explicitly.

Decades later the pattern repeats with variations:

• · George W. Bush’s 1976 DUI surfacing days before the 2000 election
• · The Trump Access Hollywood tape and the late Clinton email revelations in 2016
• · Hurricane Sandy in October 2012 and Obama’s response was positive for his campaign
• · Assorted foreign policy or scandal drops that dominate cable and social media for 72 hours

The common thread is timing. With early voting, mail-in ballots, and compressed news cycles, an October event has maximum leverage and minimal time for full scrutiny or counter narratives. Whether organic or engineered, the incentives favor dramatic movement right before ballots are finalized.

Quillette.

The author is dead, the French philosopher Roland Barthes famously declared in 1967. Now it seems the book is, too. Surveys from across the world show an ever-decreasing appetite for literature. In the US, the percentage of thirteen-year-olds who claimed to never or hardly ever read for pleasure rose from 8 per cent to 29 per cent over the four decades between 1984 and 2020. In the UK, the percentage of children who said they enjoy reading in their free time fell 36 per cent between 2005 and 2025. The stats are not much more encouraging for older generations, with nearly half of all adults in the UK and a quarter in the US claiming to have read no books at all in the past year.

This is not a new or sudden development. As early as 1985, the media theorist Neil Postman was writing about how the rise of television had relegated reading to a distant second place on the podium of recreational entertainment. But the decline of the book has, until recently, remained steady, not to mention masked by the fact that literacy rates have continued to improve across the globe. Text is, after all, everywhere: on our social media sites, on our subtitled TV shows, on the countless placards and signposts and advertisements that have saturated the modern world. If reading is good because it stimulates the mind, as the advocates of literature often say, then our brains are more engaged than ever before.

WIRED, a Voice of the Crust.

I’m astonished that they actually printed this.

Watch it.

ShoeOnHead explains it all to you, in her own inimitable way.

Freeberg does a deep dive.

Seems every state in the union is red+blue the same way. All these vast sprawling acres of farmland, populated, sparsely, by sensible red-state voters with these super tiny super dense speckles of city voting blue. The elections are contests that determine whether these tiny dense speckles of blue voters can outvote these sparsely populated sprawling swaths of red voters.

And whether or not that happens, is determined in large part by how close to the coastline the state is. Check the map. The landlocked states, by and large, are “red” states…even though each and every single one has cities that vote blue. They just got outvoted by the red. And then the coastline states are blue states. They also have their red-state farmland, but it got outvoted by the cities.

Now why is that?

Watch it.

Because we all want to do that, don’t we?

“We live in a world where you either order shit or you deliver shit. And you really don’t want to deliver shit.”

— Chris Rock

Read it.

Sergey Brin once called government a “giant bonfire of partisanship” and spent years on the political sidelines. But in recent months, the Google co-founder has emerged as a political force in California, pouring unprecedented sums into the fight to defeat a proposed tax on billionaires.

…

“Brin could have easily just run a No campaign and defeated [Prop 40], but he built a whole organization,” said Brandon Castillo, a veteran ballot measures consultant who is not working on either side of the wealth tax campaign. “They’ve awakened him. He wants to be a political player.”

Brin has learned the Microsoft Lesson: Those who ignore politics are doomed to be buggered by those who don’t.

Babylon Bee.

Very kind of them.

Take time ot mow the flowers.

Newsweek, a Voice of the Crust.

Vegan diets have been growing in popularity in recent years. However, experts investigated the impacts of an all-plant based diet in mice and found that it had a worrying effect on their liver.

Researchers at the University of Geneva, Switzerland, saw that when mice were switched to an exclusively plant-based diet, within only a few days their liver function changed and they experienced a significant decrease in motivation to do physical activity.

Unlike human vegans, who are a pain in the ass wherever they go.

Not the Bee.

I mean it. This might be the best thing on Instagram this week.

Trisha Fenimore, a conservative content creator, posted a series of videos on Wednesday theorizing about a “conspiracy” by the Left to break major sex scandals right before elections to sway female voters.

Rollo Tomassi made the same point on his podcast last Sunday. He predicted that on the day after the election the Cornell 7 will disappear into the void. Considering that the incident happened two years ago, I think he’s got a point.

Don’t call it ‘conspiracy theory’—call it ‘spoiler alert’.