Real Clear Defense.

As the Taiwanese legislature continues to debate the merits of a major defense spending bill by the Democratic Progressive Party (DDP). Taiwan must be aware that it risks being viewed by the West as an ally with a credible chance of being rapidly overwhelmed. As an alternative to the DDP’s proposed legislation, the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) introduced a bill which capped defence spending at NT$400 billion (12.6 billion USD) instead of NT$1.25 trillion (39.74 billion USD), while also omitting the provisions of the larger bill which called for the procurement of drone platforms, a larger integrated air defense system (IADS) know as the T-Dome, spare parts for attack helicopters, and more. Such a lack of preparation would reduce the opportunities allies have to come to its defense, especially if Taiwan seems politically weak, and the military balance of power appears too lop-sided in favor of China.

‘People’s Party’ tells you all you need to know about what they stand for.

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This post is about “real” hydrogen. Produced externally, at scale, using dedicated energy sources. Stored on the vehicle in high-pressure or cryogenic tanks. Consumed in a fuel cell that produces electricity to drive the wheels. No exhaust but water vapour.

This technology works. Hyundai has 165 XCIENT fuel cell trucks running commercially across Switzerland, Germany, France, the Netherlands and Austria, with another 63 in North America. The European fleet hit 20 million kilometres in January 2026. They haul food, beverages, textiles, and construction materials. They refuel in 10-20 minutes. They carry meaningful payloads over real distances.

None of them operate in the UK. That fact alone tells you something about where the problem lies.

The truck is not the problem. The problem is everything around it.

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A visual guide to the industrial processes you can no longer permit in the state of California — and the grandfathered facilities that still can.

Read it.

The convoluted story of how a species of dog first arrived in Australia and subsequently took over the Outback challenges fundamental notions about what it means to be “native.”

…

Indeed, the claim has been made that the dingo, whatever its origins, is now a fully wild animal, enmeshed in its ecosystem — and it cannot, therefore, be equated with domestic livestock or be condemned as a mere escaped dog. So the argument goes. This, however, is exactly the difficulty: The status “feral” almost by definition means it cannot be outgrown. Wildness and domesticity constitute a sharp, ontological binary, and the state of “feral-ness” is a catch-all label for any member of the latter group caught attempting to escape — quite hopelessly — the original sin of human companionship. The Midas touch of our species, whose brush invariably transmutes nature into artifice, can take lineages out of the wild, but it cannot put them back. Once a domestic, always a domestic. There is no requiem for the stray dog.

Every time I see a dingo I think “Carolina Yellow Dog”.

Coincidence? I think not….

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“We were at our richest from 1870 to 1913. That’s when we were a tariff country,” said President Donald Trump recently, and he’s not wrong. But tariffs aren’t the whole story. The genius of the Gilded Age was interstate regulatory and tax competition.

That economy boomed. From 1870 to 1913, America’s gross domestic product grew at nearly 5% per year. Even though America’s population nearly tripled during that time, with 30 million immigrants, per capita GDP doubled. Steel production boomed, surpassing Britain, France, and Germany combined. Railway miles quadrupled. A period that began amid the ruins of civil war ended with America in first place among the world’s great economic powers.

Washington collected lots of tariffs then, but little else. Before the 16th Amendment paved the way for federal income taxes in 1913, Congress was spending barely 1% of GDP—compared with nearly 25% today. Meanwhile, the federal power to regulate commerce was limited to transactions that actually crossed state lines, leaving the vast majority of regulation to the states.

The year 1913 was the year America went to shit: 16th Amendment (income tax), 17th Amendment (direct popular election of Senators, turning a republic into a democracy), Woodrow Wilson (fascism comes to America), the Federal Reserve (government gets to pee in the soup by printing money whenever it wants to).

Then 1919 put the last nails in the coffin: 18th Amendment (prohibition, giving us the Mafia), 19th Amendment (votes for women, giving us emotion-driven politics), and the Treaty of Versailles (giving us Hitler and eventually World War II).

My question is: What is the baby changing into?

MIT News.

Next time you cross a crowded plaza, crosswalk, or airport concourse, take note of the pedestrian flow. Are people walking in orderly lanes, single-file, to their respective destinations? Or is it a haphazard tangle of personal trajectories, as people dodge and weave through the crowd?

MIT instructor Karol Bacik and his colleagues studied the flow of human crowds and developed a first-of-its-kind way to predict when pedestrian paths will transition from orderly to entangled. Their findings may help inform the design of public spaces that promote safe and efficient thoroughfares.

SciTechDaily.

Although the world’s languages differ enormously in sound systems, vocabulary, and structure, researchers have long observed that certain grammatical patterns appear repeatedly across cultures. A new study finds that many of these recurring features may be more than a coincidence.

After applying advanced evolutionary modeling techniques, the researchers report that about one-third of the long-proposed “linguistic universals”—patterns believed to exist across all languages—show clear statistical support.

The international research team, led by Annemarie Verkerk (Saarland University) and Russell D. Gray (Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology), analyzed data from Grambank, the most extensive global database of grammatical features. They tested 191 proposed universals across more than 1,700 languages, making this one of the broadest examinations of cross-linguistic structure to date.

Read it.

Heat pumps are having a moment. Governments promote them, utilities love them, and they are, now more often than ever, described as an obvious replacement for fossil fuels (oil, coal, gas), fueled heating. The basic idea sounds great…a heat pump works like a reverse refrigerator. Instead of “pushing heat out, it pulls heat in”. That heat can come from the air outside your house or from the ground below it.

The International Energy Agency (IEA) sums up the enthusiasm nicely. “Heat pumps, powered by low?emissions electricity, are the central technology in the global transition to secure and sustainable heating. Heat pumps currently available on the market are three?to?five times more energy efficient than natural gas boilers. That statement contains three big claims:

(1) heat pumps are three to five times more efficient,

(2) they run on “low-emission” electricity, and

(3) they are secure and sustainable

All three deserve a closer look, so here we go…

Richard Vigilante.

71 days.

That’s how long it took Venom, a powerful, new, U.S. autonomous strike aircraft (aka a drone) to move from concept to flying prototype.

71 days. In traditional aerospace terms, that is almost indecent.

For decades, the path from concept to first flight has stretched across years. Requirements proliferated with each committee’s two cents. Design reviews accumulated. Tooling lead times expanded. Certification protocols hardened. Oversight layered on top. The system evolved to prevent embarrassment, not accelerate learning.

All that is going away. Elon Musk and Pete Hegseth are driving a radical improvement in how the U.S. military develops and acquires weapons, which, in turn, will radically change U.S. war fighting doctrine and ultimately transform U.S. manufacturing.

Read it.

There’s an obvious growing failure at the center of modern markets that, as a former short seller, has become beyond obvious to me over the years.

It isn’t just fraud or aggressive accounting. It’s the ecosystem that allows both to thrive: financial media that won’t press, and a sell side that won’t risk upsetting management teams they depend on for access.

We’ve seen this movie before. Enron did not implode because there were no warning signs. It imploded because the warning signs were inconvenient. There were whistleblowers. There were people inside the system who knew the numbers didn’t add up. But complexity was treated as brilliance, and skepticism was treated as cynicism. Analysts admired the innovation. Television hosts admired the executives.

And the stock went up—until it didn’t.

Covered-call option funds and ETFs are paying pretty nice dividends these days.

BBC, a Voice of the Crust.

Rituals come in many different forms and are practised in cultures the world over, but why have they become such an important part of our lives?

Because they reduce uncertainty. If you’ve done something once and it worked out well, you’d be stupid not to do it the same way that worked before. Duh.

When the anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski visited the Trobriand Islands in Papua New Guinea in the early 20th Century, he noted the elaborate preparations fishermen would make before setting out to sea. They would carefully paint their canoes with black, red and white paint, chanting spells as they did so. The vessel would be struck with wooden sticks, the bows stained with red ochre and crew members would adorn their arms with shells.

Malinowski recorded a long list of ceremonies and rituals the islanders would perform before venturing out onto the open sea. But when the fishermen went out into the nearby calm lagoon, they did not use these rites. Malinowski concluded that the “magic” rituals performed by the islanders were a response to help them cope with the unpredictable might of the Pacific Ocean.

Sometimes the old ways are best.

Read it.

God is angry at the Other Left Coast. When will they take the hint?

Jeff Geerling.

This weekend I had to buy a new dishwasher because our old GE died.

I bought a Bosch 500 series because that’s what Consumer Reports recommended, and more importantly, I could find one in stock.

After my dad and I got it installed, I went to run a rinse cycle, only to find that that, along with features like delayed start and eco mode, require an app.

Not only that, to use the app, you have to connect your dishwasher to WiFi, set up a cloud account in something called Home Connect, and then, and only then, can you start using all the features on the dishwasher.

I always check for that before buying something. I would not buy such a product. (I do have a Bosch dishwasher, because I think them one of the best brands going, but the one I have works without an app.)

The Gothamist.

As far as enduring New York City icons go, sky-high sandwiches are right up there with pizza, the Statue of Liberty, rats and Carrie Bradshaw. And right now, they’re having a major moment.

Let’s begin with the Mama’s Too Chicken Alla Vodka sandwich — arguably New York’s current social media champ in the big-sammy category — which combines cutlets, vodka sauce, pesto and burrata for a “messy and beautiful” handheld that could get you “a bit turned on.”

I’ve also seen and heard talk of the “dumb-good” Gargiulo Burger, a roast beef plus patty plus broth creation at Brennan & Carr in Sheepshead Bay that had one guy invoking the Sign of the Cross and murmuring about the “terrible things” it made him want to do.

The obvious quibble is that these aren’t ‘too big to eat’, merely ‘too big to eat at one time’. This is like the ‘giant economy size’ packages of Stuff in grocery stores—businesses like to sell in what are to them profitable quantities, so they either give you a break on the price-per-component-unit or just make the minimum size from which they can profit into the minimum size that you can buy.

Mr & Mrs Psmith’s Bookshelf:

LLMs, when working exactly as intended, enable human falsehood — because our society relies on written records as proof of work. Until recently that was fine, because writing down lies actually used to be pretty hard: putting together a convincing false report from scratch — maintenance records for the airplane you’re about to board, say, or a radiologist’s report on your brain scan — was almost as time-consuming as actually checking the things that were supposed to checked and then documenting them, and the liar had to spend the whole time aware of their own dishonesty. (Not that this stops everyone, of course.) But now that it takes about two clicks to generate an inspector’s report for the house you’re considering buying, or the pathologist’s findings in your biopsy, how much are you going to trust that they actually looked?

Politics makes for a mean game of Twister.

Read it.

For eons, Canadians have viewed Alabama as a small state that, save for a few pockets, is dirt poor. All anybody seems to know about Alabama is that Montgomery and Birmingham were the centre of the civil rights movement. In 1963, when Martin Luther King Jr. wrote his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” he called Birmingham “probably the most thoroughly segregated city in the United States.”

So, it was a shock when Canadian economist Trevor Tombe and the International Monetary Fund ran the numbers in 2023 and 2024 and concluded that Canada had, in fact, become poorer than Alabama.

Socialism will do that to you.

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China reacted with unease to the daring U.S. military raid on Iran’s nuclear facilities with official state media voicing fears that underground Chinese nuclear sites are vulnerable to similar strikes, according to a U.S. Air Force think tank report.

Yeah—sweat, you bastards. Then start playing nice.

They did, however, call you a kafir, and would like to be able to call you a dhimmi. But you have a point.

Read it.

I’d be happy to pay to read the Wall Street Journal if I could get it for 10 cents a copy, as I did in my first job in 1978, rather than paying over $500 a year for a subscription.

The Economist, a Voice of the Crust.

Just six years ago Democratic states looked like they were better at educating children than Republican ones. Their pupils scored higher on reading and maths tests. But since the pandemic students in places like Alabama, Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas have shot up the national rankings.

Gee, I wonder why? Perhaps by eliminating Woke indoctrination and actually teaching facts and skills?

Adjust the results for such things as student poverty, and the “southern surge” is even more impressive. On a ranking compiled by the Urban Institute, a think-tank, Mississippi comes top (see chart 1). Florida, Texas and Louisiana also beat Massachusetts, the state that scores best when disadvantage is not taken into account.

Notice that they can’t give you straight data; it has to be ‘adjusted’—which is how we got the Climate Change Crisis.

It helps that red states have gone back to basics: legislators in state capitals have enacted new rules that require teaching reading via phonics and holding failing schools accountable. Those decisions matter a great deal for classrooms. But America is made up of more than 13,000 school districts, most of which have the autonomy to set policy, too. That gives cities and towns across the country the opportunity to run small experiments to figure out how to get students to learn—and then to double down on what works.

And there it is. Education majors need not apply.

Read it.

France is witnessing an extraordinary religious resurgence, as record numbers of young people flock to churches for Ash Wednesday and baptism, Le Figaro highlights in a recent article.

Once considered a global bastion of secularism, the country is seeing a 17% rise in adult baptisms in Paris alone, with figures jumping over 50% in just two years. According to analysts, this spiritual awakening is largely driven by a generation searching for direction and meaning in a world dominated by “materialistic indigestion” and geopolitical instability.

Watch it.

China is doing some strange things with robots.

If I were rich, I’d hire these guys as my security team. i doubt that they would be overly troubled by Illegal Orders.

The Telegaph (UK).

On Wednesday morning, one US government official thought there was a 90 per cent chance of the US declaring war on Iran within weeks.

By Wednesday afternoon, when Donald Trump demanded Sir Keir Starmer keep hold of the Diego Garcia military base, some had upgraded it to a “99 per cent chance”.

Exactly why Mr Trump suddenly turned on the Prime Minister’s deal to hand over the Chagos Islands to Mauritius and rent back the joint US-UK base is unclear. He had issued a tepid endorsement of the agreement just two weeks ago.

But the theory spreading around Washington is that the US president’s hand was forced by the prospect of imminent war with Iran.

The Telegraph (UK).

US fighter jets tracked as heading towards the Middle East could be laying the groundwork for a major bombing campaign.

The uptick in warplanes travelling to the Gulf is likely to be used to clear the way for heavy bombers to strike at the heart of Iran’s regime, experts have said.

Large numbers of American combat aircraft and support planes such as air-to-air refuellers have been seen moving eastwards this week.

The combination of the approaching USS Gerald R Ford strike group and the USS Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier, which is already positioned in the Arabian Sea, analysts predict that Donald Trump is preparing a sustained military campaign against Iran.

The Telegraph (UK).

Naval sailors are to go on strike over pay so low that it may be in breach of minimum wage laws.

Personnel from the Royal Fleet Auxiliary (RFA) will stage a walkout in the near future following a strike vote by the Rail, Maritime and Transport (RMT) trade union.

RFA sailors crew tankers and supply ships used by the Royal Navy. The union claimed it cannot show that all its members “are even being paid at least the minimum wage for the hours they are required to work”.

The latest vote was accompanied by the claim that RFA sailors’ 12-hour working shifts at sea may not comply with minimum wage laws, which guarantee an income of £12.21 per hour for those aged 21 and over.

Lifehacker.

You don’t have to want to live forever (a la the millionaire-immortality-influencer Bryan Johnson) to want to live longer. I’ve seen a larger shift in the fitness industry lately, where a focus on “longevity” has replaced where you might have once seen the words “beach body.” All around us, the language has shifted from “get shredded” to “increase healthspan,” from “tone up” to “build bone density.” In this new era, the goal isn’t just looking good at the beach, but making sure you can still walk on that beach when you’re ninety.

On its face, this is a welcome change. I’ll always advocate for metrics of success that are less about how you look in a mirror, and more about how well your body functions across decades. At the same time, I’m skeptical of the ways “metabolic flexibility,” “muscle mass preservation,” and “inflammation control” are replacing “beach body” in the wellness lexicon. Is this truly progress in how we think about health?

Again: A fundamental reimagining of why we exercise is not altogether bad. I’m just not convinced that’s what’s happening here. Is this obsession with longevity actually in good faith? Or are we being sold the same old products and insecurities, now wrapped in shiny new scientifically sounding packaging?

Read it.

It was the image that launched a cultural icon. In 1967, in the northern Californian woods, a seven foot tall, ape-like creature covered in black fur and walking upright was captured on camera, at one point turning around to look straight down the lens. The image is endlessly copied in popular culture – it’s even become an emoji. But what was it? A hoax? A bear? Or a real-life example of a mysterious species called the Bigfoot?

The film has been analysed and re-analysed countless times. Although most people believe it was some sort of hoax, there are some who argue that it’s never been definitively debunked. One group of people, dubbed Bigfooters, are so intrigued that they have taken to the forests of Washington, California, Oregon, Ohio, Florida and beyond to look for evidence of the mythical creature.

But why? That’s what sociologists Jamie Lewis and Andrew Bartlett wanted to uncover. They were itching to understand what prompts this community to spend valuable time and resources looking for a beast that is highly unlikely to even exist. During lockdown, Lewis started interviewing more than 130 Bigfooters (and a few academics) about their views, experiences and practices, culminating in the duo’s recent book Bigfooters and Scientific Inquiry: on the borderlands of legitimate science.

The Telegraph (UK).

Reform UK would repeal the Equality Act on “day one” of government if it wins the next general election, Suella Braverman has said.

Ms Braverman, who defected to Reform from the Tories last month, said Britain was being “ripped apart by diversity, equality and inclusion” policies.

Speaking at an event in London where she was unveiled as Reform’s new shadow education, skills and equalities secretary, Ms Braverman said her first act in government would be to abolish the equalities part of her brief.

She said: “Why does no one in this Government seem to care that it’s white working-class boys who have the worst educational outcomes in our country today?

Read it.

• Sense of touch despite thick elephant skin: Researchers have discovered that the hairs on elephants’ trunks are responsible for their extraordinary sense of touch.
• Special material properties: Elephant sensory hairs have a stiff base and a soft tip, which enables them to precisely feel objects and recognize where contact is made. These properties are similar to the whiskers of cats and differ from the completely stiff sensory hairs of rats and mice.
• Interdisciplinary collaboration: The research team at the Department of Haptic Intelligence at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems was joined by researchers from the fields of neuroscience and materials science.
• Applications in robotics: The findings will be used in the development of robot-assisted sensor technologies that mimic the stiffness gradient of elephant tactile hairs.

Joel 1: 1-5:

1 The word of the LORD that came to Joel the son of Pethuel.

2 Hear this, ye old men, and give ear, all ye inhabitants of the land. Hath this been in your days, or even in the days of your fathers?

3 Tell ye your children of it, and let your children tell their children, and their children another generation.

4 That which the palmerworm [politicians] hath left hath the locust [welfare cheats] eaten; and that which the locust [welfare cheats] hath left hath the cankerworm [race hustlers] eaten; and that which the cankerworm  [race hustlers] hath left hath the caterpiller [fraudsters and scammers] eaten.

5 Awake, ye drunkards, and weep; and howl, all ye drinkers of wine, because of the new wine; for it is cut off from your mouth.

The Telegraph (UK).

Or get you institutionalized for Obsexxive Compulsive Disorder. (Why take a chance?)

Motto of the Special Warfare Operator: Be polite to everyone you meet, but have a plan to kill them.

Read it.

Dating and relationships in the US have changed dramatically in the past decade.   Once heralded as a vast clearing house for unlimited hook ups and endless partner options, online dating apps have all but imploded compared the their peak from 2016-2021.  High traffic apps like Bumble have lost 90% of their market value.  Tinder has lost 40% of its users since 2022.  Match Group apps have lost around 50% of their engagement since 2019.

The word on the street is, the apps are cancer and no one serious about dating actually uses them.  Why?  Female hypergamy is the clear culprit; the fantasy that the grass is always greener on another man’s lawn.  Data from match apps indicates that the average woman will only “swipe right” on 6% of all men in any given dating pool.  Meanwhile, the average man will swipe right on around 60% of women.

This means that the majority of American women suffer from delusions of grandeur and refuse to settle for men that are equal to them in terms of looks and career.  The end result is an increasingly desperate mob of mid-level women all fighting each other for access to the top 5% of men – Men who might sleep with such women, but also men who have no reason to settle down with them.

Too many options for women result in no options at all.

Gee, sounds like something I would say.

Read it.

Has Europe really embarked on a nuclear reset, rethinking its US-led deterrent architecture? For the first time since the Cold War, major European capitals are openly debating the need for an independent nuclear deterrent – an emerging theme on clear display this week at the Munich Security Conference.

We’ve reported before that the turning point came in March, when Washington temporarily halted battlefield intelligence sharing with Ukraine – a move that forced allies to confront the prospect that Washington may no longer serve as a dependable security guarantor, also as ratcheting Trump rhetoric increasingly highlights Europe needing to shoulder its own defense burden.

France’s Macron and Germany’s Merz held “confidential talks” on European nuclear deterrence, the German chancellor has confirmed. Still, he tried to downplay the full implications in his Friday remarks: “We Germans are adhering to our legal obligations. We consider this strictly within the context of our nuclear sharing within NATO and we will not allow zones of differing security to emerge in Europe,” Merz said.

Trump is turning out to be the most significant President since Franklin Roosevelt. What’s he going to accomplish in the next three years?

Actually, what I heard growing up in Indiana was ‘born in a barn’, but the priciple remains.

The Foundry.

There is a growing sense of frustration coursing through American politics, and it is no longer confined to one party or ideology.

That frustration has real roots.

Major institutions badly damaged their credibility during the COVID-19 pandemic, the excesses of the Black Lives Matter movement, and years of breathless coverage of Russiagate. At the same time, artificial intelligence looms over the labor market with few clear answers about what comes next. Add to that a political class that often appears shamelessly corrupt, and the result is a public that feels misled, ignored, and exposed.

But frustration does not remain static. In the United States today, it is mutating into something darker: nihilism.

“ISMS! Get your isms here! You can’t be a pundit without an ism!”

The Foundry.

Transgender orthodoxy is in retreat in medicine, the courts, and even business—as the LGBTQ mafia bleeds allies in corporate America.

The Human Rights Campaign has long employed mafia-like tactics to pressure companies to toe the line on gender ideology, but a growing chorus of critics, assisted by President Donald Trump’s second administration, has led companies to reconsider their alliances with the organization.

About three-quarters of all Fortune 500 companies (377) disclosed their business practices to HRC in 2025, so the LGBTQ activist group could rate them on its Corporate Equality Index. This year, however, only 131 companies are working with HRC—a 65% drop.

This represents a massive hit to the transgender industrial complex, but conservatives shouldn’t rest on their laurels. In the very press release where HRC admits its massive losses, it touts its abiding impact: the companies still working with HRC employ over 22 million Americans.

Read it.

The Super Bowl has long mirrored consumer culture. This year, that mirror reflected a shift away from electric vehicle hype and toward something more grounded. After years of promotion, EVs failed to justify their place on the biggest stage in advertising.

The Foundry.

Republicans can “win big” in midterm elections if they “unwrap the gift of MAHA” that President Donald Trump has handed them, according to a new memo from Tony Lyons, president of MAHA Action.

Four to six percent of former non-Trump voters cited the “Make America Healthy Again,” or MAHA, movement in explaining their decision to switch their support to him and the Republican Party in 2024, according to Trump’s go-to pollster, Tony Fabrizio.

But the Republican Party is just “renting” those voters, Lyons said, adding that every Republican needs to buy into the MAHA movement in order to keep those votes.

“The MAHA movement is here to strategically support President Trump,” Lyons wrote. “We’re eager to help cement this new coalition. We’re looking for Republicans who share the same vision.”