The Guardian, a Voice of the Crust.

own an easy-to-miss turnoff on the A48 just outside Chepstow on the Welsh border, the gentle rumble of trucks, cranes and people at work mixes with birdsong in what is an otherwise peaceful rural setting. It is a crisp and sunny winter morning when I visit and, at first glance, the site appears to be little more than prefab containers and a car park. Yet, behind the scenes a group of men and women with expertise in diving, marine biology, technology, finance, construction and manufacturing are building something extraordinary. They have come together with a single mission statement: to make humans aquatic.

Their project is called Deep (not The Deep) and the site was chosen after a global search for the perfect location to build and test underwater accommodation, which the project founders say will enable them to establish a “permanent human presence” under the sea from 2027.

So far, so crazy sounding. Yet Deep is funded by a single anonymous private investor with deep pockets who wants to put hundreds of millions of pounds (if not more) into a project that will “increase understanding of the ocean and its critical role for humanity”, according to a Deep spokesperson. Its leadership team remains tight-lipped not only about the amount (they will only say it is substantially more than the £100m being invested into the Deep campus near Chepstow), but also about the investor’s identity. Whoever is behind it, the size of the investment means that an ambitious-sounding idea appears to be swiftly becoming a reality.

Oh—and I want twelve inches of belt armor instead of a roof.

Watch it.

Rips the mask off of colorism in the “brown world”.

Those who think that the U.S. is uniquely “racist” need to educate themselves.

The number of people around the world who prefer light skin color to dark skin color include Indians (watch the video), American Negroes (look up the “brown bag and ruler test“), south Asia, east Asia, and (for all I know) in Africa. I doubt that Obama would have been elected President had he not been half white.

Unfortunately it’s almost impossible to get any objective information on this issue because of These Degenerate Times. This video is a case in point—at one part the podcaster makes the explicit assertion that “Varna does not equal color”, which is flat BS. Varna absolutely means “color”; it is, in fact, the literal Sanskrit word for “color” (look it up on Wictionary if you doubt it). So you have The Usual Suspects clinging to the notion that “colorism” is a Product of Western Colonialism and Racism, whereas in truth in started long before “white” people left Europe. (Whenever I’m asked for my “ethnicity” on a Form, I always specify “pink”.)

“Whiteness” is only a problem in the minds of white liberals and non-white people who need a boogeyman on which to blame all of the world’s problems, the way dimwits blame Capitalism for everything even though, as I have explained at great length elsewhere, There Is No Such Thing as Capitalism.

I second that emotion.

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The Virtue Signalling Advantage of an electric car ‘trumps’ the angst of Trump Cooties Derangement Syndrome.

Navy Matters.

ComNavOps has discussed various aspects of what our naval force structure should be but it’s generally been in isolation rather than presented as a grand overview. This has sometimes made it difficult for people who haven’t been following the blog closely to understand how the individual components relate and where they fit in the overall force structure. I think it’s time to begin presenting the overall picture. One way to do this is to examine the naval force structure we’ll need to fight China and win. Of course, we lack an explicit military strategy which is what we really need to do a detailed analysis and presentation but we can still generate a pretty good picture just by looking at the typical types of naval operations that will be needed.

With that in mind, here are some of the naval operations that will be required in the China War and the specific force needed to meet those requirements.

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An experimental Chinese nuclear plant reportedly just crossed a historic threshold, successfully operating the world’s first thorium-based molten salt reactor (TMSR). The Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Shanghai Institute of Applied Physics has broken a major scientific barrier by successfully converting thorium to uranium in a historic first.

The Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post reports that the breakthrough, which took place at an experimental reactor out in the Gobi Desert, is “poised to reshape the future of clean sustainable nuclear energy.”

The War Zone.

The U.S. Navy has chosen the LST-100 from Dutch shipbuilder Damen to be the basis of a new class of Medium Landing Ships, or LSMs. The service’s goal now is to have received the first of those ships before the end of the decade, avoiding setbacks that have become worryingly commonplace with Navy shipbuilding programs in recent years. The planned acquisition of a fleet of 35 LSMs, which has been long delayed, is seen as central to enabling still-evolving U.S. Marine Corps’ expeditionary and distributed concepts of operations.

The Navy announced the LSM decision today in a video on social media that includes statements from Secretary of the Navy John Phelan, Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Daryl Caudle, and Commandant of the Marine Corps Gen. Eric Smith. This follows a similar video announcement last week, wherein the service disclosed its decision to cancel the Constellation class frigate program. Naval Sea Systems Command (NAVSEA) separately confirmed to TWZ that it is hoping to see construction of the first LST-100-based LSM start in 2026 and to take delivery of that ship in 2029. These ships are primarily expected to be used for ferrying relatively small Marine units, especially between far-flung islands, without the need for access to established port facilities, in future conflicts in the Pacific region.

Uh-huh. Ask yourself why the vehicle exiting from the bow of the shit has “UN” markings.

I find this very disquieting.

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There is a curious irony about the path trodden by many veterans of the Obama administration, including Ben Rhodes, the former deputy national-security advisor for strategic communications. The administration they served and the logic of its retrenchment policies unwittingly helped to ignite the devastating conflict that has roiled Gaza and the region beyond for the past two years. But the lesson that many former Obama deputies have drawn from this tragic episode is to forswear American intervention more completely.

Having come of age in the shadow of 11 September 2001, the younger Obama officials were disenchanted with American hard power and “forever wars,” and so they set about extricating their country from the forbidding labyrinth of the Middle East. Committed to “nation-building at home,” the Obama presidency sought to distance the United States from the territory stretching from the Persian hinterland to the Mediterranean, and as America stepped back from these tormented lands, Obama and his vice-president Joe Biden foresaw what they called a “receding tide of war.” Instead, the black flags of the Islamic State filled the security vacuum left by the American withdrawal from Iraq, while Iran’s bid for regional hegemony grew increasingly menacing and belligerent. The popular uprising against Syria’s barbaric Assad dictatorship was left almost entirely unaided, and the agony of that country’s civil war was allowed to take its grisly course.

The Islamic Republic of Iran was the main beneficiary of these years of American retreat. Its heavily armed proxies and clients in the Levant surrounded Israel in the hope of catalysing a war that would ultimately destroy the Jewish state. By the time that war broke out on 7 October 2023, it was obvious that Obama’s hankering for a post-American world had made the Middle East much more dangerous, and that this ought to have discredited the administration’s analysis. Instead, that analysis has been perversely reinforced, sweeping the Obama veterans into paroxysms of rage against American power and those indigenous forces still upholding the American regional order.

Watch it.

Nothing is sacred.

I’ve got an MBA. He’s not wrong.

Back later.

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Great weapons that no one will see coming.

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The Two percent inflation target—monetary policy’s sacred commandment for three decades—has become structurally impossible to achieve. Not because central bankers lack skill, but because every attempt to hit the target destroys the financial architecture that previous monetary expansion built. This is the endgame of central planning: a system that cannot tolerate its own success criteria without collapsing.

In fact, having a two percent inflation rate means accepting that your money will inevitably become more and more worthless year after year.  That’s like accepting the fact that you have a disease that makes you less and less healthy year after year. The end point of either process is obvious and accepting that as a normal state is stupid.

New York Post.

More Americans are wising up to the fact that higher education has become a raw deal for all too many young people.

A new NBC News poll finds that a full 63% of voters believe a four-year college degree now isn’t worth it, since many students graduate with “a large amount of debt” but no “specific job skills.”

That’s up markedly from 2013, when a majority took the opposite view, as 53% called a degree “worth the cost because people have a better chance to get a good job and earn more money over their lifetime.”

That was the case for generations of Americans, who saw college as a key step to higher-paying jobs and a better life: “Upwardly mobile” was almost entirely synonymous with “college-educated.”

But over the last few decades, the dynamic has shifted: Far too many college degrees guarantee nothing … except onerous debt.

Where you find Muslims and Communists, there you find terrorism.

Nature.

Many children from low-income backgrounds worldwide fail to master school mathematics1; however, some children extensively use mental arithmetic outside school2,3. Here we surveyed children in Kolkata and Delhi, India, who work in markets (n?=?1,436), to investigate whether maths skills acquired in real-world settings transfer to the classroom and vice versa. Nearly all these children used complex arithmetic calculations effectively at work. They were also proficient in solving hypothetical market maths problems and verbal maths problems that were anchored to concrete contexts. However, they were unable to solve arithmetic problems of equal or lesser complexity when presented in the abstract format typically used in school. The children’s performance in market maths problems was not explained by memorization, access to help, reduced stress with more familiar formats or high incentives for correct performance. By contrast, children with no market-selling experience (n?=?471), enrolled in nearby schools, showed the opposite pattern. These children performed more accurately on simple abstract problems, but only 1% could correctly answer an applied market maths problem that more than one third of working children solved (??=?0.35, s.e.m.?=?0.03; 95% confidence interval?=?0.30–0.40, P?<?0.001). School children used highly inefficient written calculations, could not combine different operations and arrived at answers too slowly to be useful in real-life or in higher maths. These findings highlight the importance of educational curricula that bridge the gap between intuitive and formal maths.

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The bewildering truth behind human technological enslavement is that it is impossible without the voluntary participation of the intended slaves. People must welcome technocracy into their lives in order for it to succeed. The populace has to believe, blindly, that they cannot live without it, or that authoritarianism by algorithmic consensus is “inevitable.”

For example, the average person living in a first world economy voluntarily carries a cell phone everywhere they go at all times without fail. To be without it, in their minds, is to be naked, at risk, unprepared and disconnected from civilization. I grew up in the 1980s and we did just fine without having a phone on our hip every moment of the day. Even now, I refuse to carry one.

Why? First, as most people should be aware of by now (the Edward Snowden revelations left no doubt), a cell phone is a perfect technocratic device. It has multilayered tracking, using GPS, WiFi routers, and cell tower triangulation to track your every step. Not only that, but it can be used to record your daily patterns, your habits, who your friends are, where you were on any given day many months or years ago.

Then there’s the backdoor functions hidden in app software that allows governments and corporations to to access your cell’s microphone and camera, even when you think the device is shut off. The private details of your life could be recorded and collated. In a world where privacy is being declared “dead” by boasting technocrats, why help them out by carrying something that listens to everything you say and chronicles everything you do?

Anybody who wants to track my movements needs to get a life.

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Trump plays Mamdani like a guitar. The master at work….

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I find it difficult to talk about the history of the computer. The actual record is dreadfully short: almost nothing of consequence happened before the year 1935. We keep looking for a better story, but we inevitably end up grasping at straws.

Just look at what we’ve done so far. The “father of the computer” is no longer Konrad Zuse (Z1, 1938) or John Mauchly (ENIAC, 1943). Somehow, we pivoted to Charles Babbage — a 19th century polymath who never constructed such a device, and had no luck inspiring others to try. Not content with this injustice, we also turned “computing” into a meaningless word. On Wikipedia, the timeline of computer hardware includes mechanical clocks, dolls, weaving looms, and a miniature chariot from 910 BCE. It’s historical synthesis run amok.

To me, the calculator is a particularly regrettable casualty of this expansionist approach. Of course, the development of the calculator is intertwined with the history of the computer — but it deserves to be treated as a story of its own.

Watch it.

In case you’re interested.

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Carl Benjamin (“Sargon of Akkad”) does a deep dive.

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Billionaire venture capitalist Marc Andreessen has grown impatient with what he regards as a dangerously misguided national conversation about manufacturing in the United States, one that continues to fixate on bringing back the factories and jobs that disappeared four decades ago, when the far more consequential opportunity lies in dominating the complex, capital-intensive, software-defined hardware industries that will shape the rest of the century.

Apparently ‘billionaire’ is some sort of credential these days.

Read it.

Very true. Economics is downstream from politics, as politics is downstream from culture.

The doctrines of socialism have been with us for more than 150 years, but no one had really tried it in a total way until the advent of the Soviet Union from the 1920s to the early 1990s. During that period, a number of communist/socialist revolutions occurred in Asia, Cuba, and Africa, all of which provided a laboratory to observe how these socialist economies would perform.

The socialist economies failed spectacularly, as Ludwig von Mises had predicted. His works on socialism published in 1920 and in 1923 show that, as an economic system, it was doomed before it ever was implemented because it had no practical system of economic calculation. Despite the propaganda beamed at people both from socialist governments and the western media that socialist economies were lifting vast numbers of people from poverty, the reality of socialism was what Mises had predicted.

By 1989, even die-hard socialists like Robert Heilbroner had to admit that socialism had been a huge failure. Indeed, by the mid-1990s, the only countries attempting to continue with the socialist experiment were Cuba and North Korea, and neither economy was one to be envied.

The New York Times, a Voice of the Crust.

My inbox is regularly deluged with story pitches, so I considered one that came on Sept. 15 with my usual dose of skepticism.

A publicist was offering “a potential exclusive” regarding “a highly sensitive, confidential matter,” involving a collection “lost to the world for decades.”

It sounded almost too titillating to be true. So I agreed to get on the phone and hear more.

Thus began my journey of reporting on the 137-carat Florentine Diamond, which had been missing for 100 years and was assumed to have been lost, stolen or recut and sold in pieces. It turned out the diamond had been under our noses all along: in a bank in Canada, where the Hapsburg family had stored it in a vault for security.

Jewels! Secrecy! Royalty!

Who could ask for anything more?

Quibble: The Order of the Golden Fleece is NOT the “Habsburg family house order”, which is the Order of Maria Theresa.

The Order of the Golden Fleece (Toison d’Or) is one of the oldest chivalric orders in Europe, originating in the Duchy of Burgundy in the 15th century and making it’s way to the Spanish Habsburgs over the course of time. During the War of the Spanish Succession it was claimed by both the King of Spain and the Archduke of Austria (Holy Roman Emperor), and it has been doubled ever since—any formal portrait of King Felipe will show him wearing it. (Since he’s a Bourbon, he wouldn’t be giving such pride of place to a “Habsburg family house order”.)

(But, really, who expects a scribbler for the NYT to get the facts straight?)

Daily Record (UK).

A fire has spread through pavilions being used for UN climate talks in Brazil.

Attendees were evacuated from the Cop30 event, the day before it was set to finish up. Officials said that no one has been injured in the fire.

Pity.

Brazil’s Tourism Minister Celso Sabino told journalists at the scene that the fire started near the China pavilion, which was among several pavilions set up for events on the sidelines of the climate talks.

Well. There it is.

The Economist, a Voice of the Crust.

By some reckonings, nicotine is as addictive as cocaine. It has led legions to a slow death by cigarette. Increasingly, however, people consume nicotine on its own. Nicotine vapes and oral pouches have soared in popularity; the global vaping market is expected to grow to $47.5bn in 2028, up from $22.5bn in 2022. But is nicotine simply a compound on which people are hooked or does it offer some kind of benefit?

Nicotine is much less harmful than the tobacco that naturally contains it. It has never been found to cause cancer. Nor does it cause other smokers’ diseases such as emphysema. But it is, of course, strongly linked with why smokers smoke at all. Beyond avoiding nicotine-induced withdrawal symptoms, such as irritability and anxiety, many say they smoke to “stay focused”. This has led scientists to consider whether nicotine might directly influence people’s ability to think.

In 2010 researchers at America’s National Institutes of Health pooled the results of 41 trials on nicotine’s cognitive effects. Participants were either given a placebo or nicotine (though a few used tobacco, not pure nicotine). They found that a nicotine hit had “significant positive effects” on attention and memory.

This mental sharpening arises because nicotine is a stimulant. It prods neurons to release brain chemicals called neurotransmitters, including dopamine, glutamate, noradrenaline and serotonin. These promote alertness, learning, memory and motor control. Brain-scan studies also show that nicotine’s stimulating properties increase blood flow to parts of the brain involved in thinking, such as the prefrontal cortex and the thalamus.

In addition to improving short-term memory, nicotine also suppresses appetite, which is why so many models and actresses smoke.

My Brother the Socialist became a regular cigarette smoker in college, as many people do. Most, however, pick it up as adolescents, because ‘cool’. I’ve never met anyone who picked up the smoking habit after age 20.

The Foundry.

Even Obamacare supporters now admit their health plan has failed. Despite promises of decreasing premiums, the sad truth has come to light. Over ten years in, Obamacare has become part of the problem, not the solution. Premiums keep rising, deductibles skyrocketed, enrollees have fewer choices than before, and plans have become more restrictive.

While more subsidies might mask some of those premium increases, they do nothing to solve Obamacare’s other problems. The reality? Health care costs are increasing across the board. What’s needed now is a plan to make American health care affordable again—not just to hand out more government subsidies to more people, but to make health care less expensive and more accessible for all Americans.

President Donald Trump’s instincts are right, both on fixing Obamacare and on making the overall health system more affordable for everyone.

Read it.

Attendance at Orthodox churches around the U.S. has seen a dramatic increase in conservative young men drawn to a more rigorous practice of Christianity, reports The New York Times.

“In the whole history of the Orthodox Church in America, this has never been seen,” the Very Rev. Andrew Damick, an Antiochian Orthodox priest and author in Eastern Pennsylvania, told the news outlet. “This is new ground for everyone.”

Orthodox Christians belong to the family of Eastern Orthodox Churches, one of the three main branches of global Christianity (alongside Roman Catholicism and Protestantism). The Eastern Orthodox Church is the second-largest Christian denomination in the world, with an estimated 220 to 260 million adherents.

The religion has been present in the United States since the late 18th century and today represents a small but historically significant branch of Christianity, with roughly 1 million to 1.2 million adherents across various Eastern Orthodox jurisdictions, according to the Assembly of Canonical Orthodox Bishops’ most recent estimates.

Hint: The quasi-masculine Boss Babe has no place in the Orthodox Church.

UPDATE: Orthodox Church Pews Are Overflowing With Converts (Ruth Graham/New York Times)

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Rep. Clay Higgins, R-La., was the lone House member to vote against the measure compelling release of thousands of unclassified documents tied to Jeffrey Epstein, insisting the bill remains dangerously flawed despite overwhelming bipartisan support.

Higgins said he has been a “principled ‘NO'” from the start, arguing the legislation “abandons 250 years of criminal justice procedure” and threatens to expose innocent people swept into past investigations.

“As written, this bill reveals and injures thousands of innocent people — witnesses, family members, people who provided alibis,” Higgins said in a statement on X. “Released to a rabid media, it will absolutely result in innocent people being hurt. Not by my vote.”

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Ha-Joon Chang recently wrote an article in the Financial Times criticising the state of economic education, which drew considerable attention. What went almost unnoticed, however, was a letter published in response. Surprisingly, one of the most prominent Austrian economists, Mario Rizzo, agreed with Chang. He wrote:

“Recently, I had a chance to look at some exams in undergraduate economics courses, including the first course, generally called ‘Principles.’ What I saw was disturbing. The students were given, mainly or only, problem sets of a completely mathematical nature. The emphasis was on mechanical problem-solving. There were no questions involving critical reflection on the ideas or frameworks taught.”

What explains this unlikely agreement between two economists from opposite schools of thought? The simple answer is that there is something wrong with economic education. But the deeper problem lies not in what is taught, but how it is taught.

No, the problem is the entire concept of the ‘field’. Like psychology, economics pretends to be a science whereas it’s actually a new form of astrology.

The foundation of Real Science is mensurability and predictability. Complex systems like the human personality and a large economy are only partially measurable and only statistically predictable. If you drop a rock, you can measure how fast it falls and how far it falls; you can predict how far and how fast it will fall and be right every single time. If you try to measure an ‘economy’, or predict what it will do, you can only quantify a very limited portion and you can only make predictions in terms of probabilities.

Ask an economist what his field is all about and he will say, “Production, distribution, and trade.” WRONG. “Economics” deals with production and distribution only to the extent that what is produced or distributed is traded. If I cut down a tree, cut it into boards, and make myself a workbench, economics has nothing to say about it: it cannot be measured, nor can it be predicted, because no part of it was traded. If I give that workbench to my brother-in-law, economics has nothing to say about it: it cannot be measured, nor can it be predicted, because no part of it was traded. ECONOMICS DEALS ONLY WITH TRADE, and production/distribution only as things produced/distributed are traded.

Consider the classic tool of ‘economics, the famous supply and demand curves. Those deal only with trade, as made plain by the fact that one of the dimensions of the graph is price, a thing that only has importance in trade. If the price of widgets rises from A to B, the number of widgets people are willing to buy will drop from X to Y. Who is offering those widgets? Economics can’t say. Who is buying those widgets? Economics can’t say. It can only say that in general when the price goes up the amount sold (TRADED) goes down. When the price goes up but the number sold (TRADED) stays the same, economics can’t tell you WHY; all it can do is some hand-waving about “inelastic demand”, which is another way of saying “We don’t know.”