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.”

Read it.

The most successful economics blog in the world is called Marginal Revolution. That is not an accident.

It could have been called Markets and Power, or Inequality Today, or Political Economy. It could even have been called Capitalism Explained. Instead, it is named after a nineteenth-century intellectual earthquake: the marginal revolution. A quiet reminder that modern economics begins not with slogans or moral postures, but with a way of thinking.

That reminder matters today more than we like to admit.

…

In the 1870s, almost simultaneously and largely independently, three economists overturned classical political economy. William Stanley Jevons, Carl Menger, and Léon Walras broke with the Ricardian tradition that explained value through labor, costs, or embedded substance. Value, they argued, does not come from the total amount of work put into something. It comes from the last unit—from what economists would soon call marginal valuation.

[insert my usual rant about how ‘there is no such thing as capitalism’ here]

[insert my usual rant about how ‘economics’ is a Pretend Science, like psychiatry or Grievance Studies, here]

The Marginal Revolution site is run by Tyler Cowen and Alex Tubarrok, whom regular readers of this blog will recall my having cited many times.

The Telegraph (UK).

A thief used a forklift to break into a jewellery store before fleeing the scene on a getaway donkey, footage showed.

The man, known only as MC, made the escape after robbing a store in Kayseri, central Turkey, on Tuesday.

He was filmed riding through town on the animal after taking goods from the store before being caught and arrested.

At modern prices, worth about $24,000.

Sometimes the old ways are best … when they work. Otherwise, not so much.

The War Zone.

The Arleigh Burke class destroyer USS Truxtun collided with the support ship USNS Supply while the two were conducting an at-sea replenishment yesterday, U.S. Southern Command (SOUTHCOM) has confirmed. Both ships have continued to sail safely, but two sailors were injured.

The Wall Street Journal was the first to report the collision, which is said to have occurred somewhere in the Caribbean Sea.

The full statement from SOUTHCOM, as provided to TWZ, is as follows:

“Yesterday afternoon, the Arleigh Burke-class guided missile destroyer USS Truxtun (DDG103) and the Supply-class fast combat support ship USNS Supply (T-AOE-6) collided during a replenishment-at-sea. Two personnel reported minor injuries and are in stable condition. Both ships have reported sailing safely. The incident is currently under investigation.”

Some captain is going to get relieved and some watch officer is going to be encouraged to go into another line of work.

Quillette.

In some of the most beautiful and prosperous places in America, a curious paradox has taken hold: the people who benefit most from capitalism increasingly appear to resent it. They live in high-amenity cities and mountain towns with preserved open space, reliable infrastructure, advanced healthcare, abundant leisure, and the freedom to choose where and how they live. These conditions did not arise spontaneously. They are the cumulative result of markets, private investment, innovation, and long-term economic growth. Yet in these same environments, it has become socially fashionable to describe capitalism as immoral, exploitative, or fundamentally broken. This is often dismissed as hypocrisy. That framing is too simple. What we are witnessing is not merely individual inconsistency, but a structural paradox produced by success itself. Capitalism generates abundance, and abundance reshapes human priorities.

[insert usual rant about There Ain’t No Such Thing As Capitalism here]

Read it.

There is a reason for this sudden interest in things military: Russia. Let’s be honest, Russia is currently losing the war in Ukraine. That doesn’t mean to say Putin will give up. If he does, he’s dead. Russia is not big on accountability, but having 1.5 million men killed in a five years’ long three-day ‘special military operation’ requires accountability. Even for Putin. In the unlikely case a temporary peace agreement can be reached favoring Russia — any other agreement is not going to happen — Ukraine is just a stepping stone, about half way. It is no coincidence Finland and Sweden have joined NATO.

Read it.

The ‘Rules Based’ International legal order, that convenient phantom, had its coffin nailed at Nuremburg in 1945. Yet the accepted mainstream news take on Venezuela was that Maduro’s flight of fancy to the US was something crashing the norms of the ordered world of modernity. A usurpation of the decent normalcy of the twentieth century. Please. As Cicero opined “In time of war, the laws are silent” (Inter arma enim silent leges).

On 3 January 2026, United States armed forces carried out a military operation in Venezuela that resulted in the capture of President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, who were transported to the United States to face federal criminal charges. The intervention has since generated intense legal debate, centring on whether the actions violated international law, constitutional constraints on the use of force, and longstanding principles of sovereignty and immunity.

Legal scholars and international law authorities rolled out the usual verbatim responses. That the use of force by one state against another is tightly circumscribed by the United Nations Charter, particularly Article 2(4), which prohibits the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state absent Security Council authorisation or a valid claim of self-defence. According to international law expert Geoffrey Robertson KC, the operation’s conduct “was contrary to Article 2(4) of the United Nations Charter” and constitutes a ‘crime of aggression’, describing it as ‘the worst crime of all.’

Unfortunately they can’t take their football and go home because their football is imaginary.

Critics also point to wider implications for sovereign immunity and the protection afforded to sitting heads of state under international law. As articulated by the panel of UN human rights experts, the unprovoked use of armed force on Venezuelan sovereign territory is a breach of international law and may ‘also constitute the international crime of aggression attributable to the individual political and military leaders involved.’ They further noted that under international law, a sitting head of state like Maduro enjoys immunity from the criminal jurisdiction of foreign courts while in office, complicating the legal basis for his abduction and prosecution.

And yet the “International Community” (specifically the U.N.) has done fuck-all about it. They recognize that Trump knows that the football is imaginary and has decided to rub their noses in the dirt.

The broader concern among legal scholars is that permitting such actions without robust legal justification weakens international legal norms. If one state can use force on another’s territory based on indictments or alleged criminal conduct, the prohibition on the use of force that underpins the UN Charter would be severely eroded, potentially inviting reciprocal interventions by other powers. These are the juridical arguments for and against the intervention.

Remind me how long the Russian war against Ukraine has been going on. I read somewhere that the Russians have been fighting the Ukrainians longer than the Russians fought the Germans during either World War.

The Foundry.

After multiple recent deadly car crashes across the United States involving illegal aliens, Florida has changed its driver test policy to require all prospective drivers to take the test in English.

“All driver license knowledge and skills testing will be conducted in English” for both non-commercial and commercial driver’s licenses, according to the new policy.

The state “remains committed to ensuring safe roadways for all Floridians and visitors by promoting clear communication, understanding of traffic laws, and responsible driving behavior,” according to the the Florida Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles.

Department of Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy responded to Florida’s new policy Monday, calling it “common sense.”

Well, it used to be common sense. Nowadays you have to talk the Transgressives into it.

Read it.

HAVING JUST SUFFERED another 300 newsroom layoffs, the closure of sections and bureaus, the exodus of many of its most venerable journalists, and the “moral infirmity” — in the words of a former editor — of transforming its editorial page into a Trumpist mouthpiece, The Washington Post is a dead newspaper walking.

It is far from alone in the graveyard.

In the US, most newspaper chains are controlled by hedge funds milking them dry, or by billionaires — The Post’s Jeff Bezos or the Los Angeles Times’ Patrick Soon-Shiong — harpooning their souls.

Tyler Cowen.

To be clear, I am not blaming Singapore on this one. But it is striking to me how much Americans do not talk about Singapore any more. They are much, much more likely to talk about Europe or England, for instance. I see several reasons for this.

I would point out that Singapore is a small place with a homogeneous culture, something that can rarely be said about most major countries, in the West and the East. Switzerland used to be the poster child for this sort of thing, but, well, Europe….

Read it.

Australia’s right-wing One Nation party (ONP) is experiencing one of its most dramatic surges in decades, as it reaches an unprecedented 27% in the latest Newspoll.

The Australian reports that the Coalition has fallen to just 18%, split between 15% for the Liberals and 3% for the Nationals, marking its worst result to date. Labor edges higher to 33%, while the Greens remain steady at 12%.

The collapse in Liberal support has triggered a wave of internal panic. Party leader Sussan Ley has recorded just 23% approval—the lowest for any major party leader in 23 years. Senior figures warn that the Coalition is on the brink of “electoral annihilation” unless it changes course.

Quillette.

The Trump administration’s US$700 million Regenerative Pilot Program, announced in late 2025, is one of the most significant federal investments in sustainable farming practices in recent history. It was greeted with widespread, almost reflexive approval by everyone from environmental groups and farm organisations to public-health advocates. But few people paused to ask what exactly “regenerative” and “sustainability” mean.

Beneath the agreeable language of soil restoration and ecological harmony lies a modern “sustainable agriculture” movement that rejects some of the technologies responsible for the greatest environmental and humanitarian advances in the history of food production. What began as a legitimate critique of soil erosion, chemical misuse, and monoculture farming has hardened into something closer to ideology, often characterised by suspicion of modern science and hostility to innovation.

Read it.

There was outrage in Westminster, when a leading politician admitted he was “shocked” that he had been lied to by another, but less leading, politician who had once been a quite leading politician before having been forced to quit over questions of honesty a few times.

That politicians lie is a well-known constant, treated almost like a law of physics—comparable to the fixed speed of light in a vacuum.

“My father was a toolmaker”, said the leading politician (the one who had not been forced to quit over questions of honesty a couple of times). “And he told me of the satisfaction he enjoyed when working with a set of tools he worked hard to complete, and in his memory, I like to believe that I also work with complete tools who give me satisfaction.”

“Having a good tool in your hands can be a satisfying experience, and I like handling well-made tools as a pastime. But enough about me. I am shocked, shocked to my core that I was lied to by a man who had been previously a leading politician, and to whom I called on to be so again but in a specific capacity, rather like a well-turned tool. But he turned out to be a bad tool, a very bad tool indeed.”

Apparently British politicians aren’t the tools they’re made out to be. I must confess I didn’t know that.

Read it.

Two journalists have just embarked on the exercise of writing a ‘biography,’ or rather a damning pamphlet, against the writer Renaud Camus, on whom they intend to heap all the ignominy of having invented and popularised the phrase ‘the great replacement.’”

But what crime is this when the expression is now swallowed and spat out by everyone, including and especially on the Left, by certain MPs and politicians who today make it a point of pride and a programme?

To feed its fundamental need to feel useful, the Left needs scapegoats. As Le Figaro editorialist Eugénie Bastié points out, Jean-Marie Le Pen is dead, so a ‘replacement’ must be found. Renaud Camus is the ideal candidate for the role.

Read it.

As a reader of science fiction, I’ve noticed that the sci-fi aisles in bookstores are getting smaller and smaller. So small, in fact, that I now regularly have to make the trip to a shop here in Berlin that still sells the “good stuff.” Fantasy seems to be taking over, at least commercially. And while this trend is no secret, I thought it would be interesting to visualize it.

On the search for a suitable dataset, I came across the Internet Speculative Fiction Database (ISFDB), a volunteer effort to maintain an up-to-date source of bibliographical information on works of fiction that fall into the genres of science fiction, fantasy, or horror.

Let’s see how often typical sci-fi words have been mentioned in the ~210,000 titles in that database over the decades:

Read it.

The recent release of a tranche of files by the US Department of Justice (DoJ) under the “Epstein Files Transparency Act (H.R.4405)” has once again prompted many people to closely examine redacted and sanitized PDF documents. Our previous articles on the Manafort papersand the Mueller report, as well as a study by Adhatarao, S. and Lauradoux, C. (2021) “Exploitation and Sanitization of Hidden Data in PDF Files: Do Security Agencies Sanitize Their PDF files?,” in Proceedings of the 2021 ACM Workshop on Information Hiding and Multimedia Security, illustrate the importance of robust sanitization and redaction workflows when handling sensitive documents prior to release.

This article examines a small random selection of the Epstein PDF files from a purely digital forensic perspective, focusing on the PDF syntax and idioms they contain, any malformations or unusual constructs, and other technical aspects.

PDFs are more challenging to analyze than many other formats because they are binary files that require specialized knowledge, expertise, and software. Please note that we did not analyze the contents of the PDF documents. Not every PDF was examined. Any mention of products (or appearance in screen-shots) does not imply any endorsement or support of any information, products, or providers whatsoever. We are not lawyers; this article does not constitute legal advice

We offer this information, in part, as some of the Epstein PDFs released by DoJ are beginning to appear on malware analysis sites (such as Hybrid-Analysis) with various kinds of incorrect analysis and misinformation.

Read it.

Nancy Guthrie, 84, disappeared from her home in the Tucson area between the evening of Saturday, February 1, and the early morning hours of Sunday. Authorities say the evidence no longer supports a voluntary disappearance and are treating the case as a suspected abduction.

Law-enforcement sources said Guthrie’s implanted pacemaker stopped communicating with her Apple devices at about 2 a.m. on February 2. When deputies later entered the home around midday, her iPhone and Apple Watch were still inside.

We have the technology.

Read it.

Suppose you’re a democratic socialist who has been invited to speak at a college campus. Who do you think would be more likely to try to silence you, a left-leaning woman or a right-wing man?

It may be reasonable to assume someone with a similar ideology would be more tolerant of your views, but new data by FIRE suggests that’s not the case. Amazingly, it turns out men are often more tolerant of the opposite side than women are of their own side.

Read it.

The UK Home Office’s Pathways training package was intended to counter the threat of radicalisation in the United Kingdom. Needless to say, this wouldn’t be the most ferocious form of radicalisation, which is Islamism, and by a huge margin. No, they decided to spend a great deal of time and taxpayers’ money on a programme highlighting that spectral terror which lurks only in the minds of civil servants and Church of England clergy—the dreaded ‘far right.’

Marketed as an interactive educational tool for schools, Pathways adopts the language and aesthetics of a video game to guide young people away from ‘dangerous pathways.’ In practice, of course, it’s only the one pathway they’re worried about. It reveals a great deal about how the modern British state now defines extremism and why that definition is detached from reality. Pathways has become a case study in institutional overreach, ideological confusion, and the persistent failure of Britain’s counter-extremism establishment to understand either public opinion or the threat landscape we ask them to manage on our behalf.

At the centre of Pathways is a character called Amelia; a purple-haired goth girl wearing a choker and a pink dress. Unless you have completely detached yourself from the internet over recent weeks, you will have almost certainly come across her, and you will have probably seen her indulging in such extremist practices as waving a Union Jack and generally loving her country.

Amelia is a teenage activist who questions mass immigration, protests against demographic transformation and expresses alarm at the direction of modern Britain. Within the game’s internal logic, engaging with Amelia’s views increases a ‘risk’ score, pushing the player closer to state intervention and the government’s Prevent process. The message is not subtle. Concerns regarding mass immigration and unwanted cultural change are treated not as political positions to be debated, but as symptoms to be managed. The line between radicalisation and dissent is not merely blurred—it is erased.

This framing exposes the true function of Pathways. It is less an anti-terrorism tool than a mechanism of ideological conditioning, one that treats mainstream concerns about borders, identity, and social cohesion as inherently suspect. In doing so, it confirms what many critics of Prevent have long argued: that counter-extremism policy has quietly expanded into the regulation of thought.

Read it.

Protesters argue that body cameras would increase accountability for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers.

Anti-ICE protesters have also demanded that ICE officers wear body cameras after incidents such as the death of Renée Good, in which ICE officer Jonathan Ross filmed the fatal encounter with his cellphone—a decision that drew criticism from many.

“If you’re an agent … then you should not be encumbered by anything in your hands,” Jonathan Wackrow, a CNN law enforcement analyst, said. “That’s what body-worn cameras are for. But they’re not wearing body-worn cameras.”

However, proponents of the policy say increased transparency could actually benefit ICE agents by protecting them from allegations and misconduct.

Be careful what you wish for.

Oh, I dont’ want to beam down with the captain
‘Cause the captain beams up alone….

Read it.

What the philosophers call utilitarianism is actually a family of moral theories with all the feuds, competitiveness and fickle alliances that families tend to have. There may be nuances involved, but there is an intellectual genealogy which takes you from Jeremy Bentham to Peter Singer, a traceable line of descent. There is no striking family resemblance in play, aside from a presumably congenital moral priggishness.

I need to say straight away, and without apology, that this family’s influence is ubiquitous and pernicious. For any offence against decency you will be sure to find a utilitarian argument lurking in the vicinity, sometimes offering to help clear up the mess it was responsible for in the first place.

Utilitarian thinking is there in the Net Zero climate idolatry, it motivates the new eugenicists of the assisted suicide movement, it underwrites the ridiculous “thought experiments” of the effective altruists.

Read it.

Is it possible to complete a trip around the world with an autonomous drone? And under 80 days? Today we will explore this crazy project that would make Jules Verne proud. And we will try to figure out if it can be done with a relatively modest budget.

Read it.

More to the point, why would you want to?

If AI is going to be throwing people out of work, and is going to have an increasing effect on the workplace, it would seem obvious that a shrinking population would be a feature, not a bug. for the same reason that a central bank (like the Federal Reserve) reduces the money supply when the economy slows down so as to prevent deflation.

The answer, of course, is that all governments are involved in a multitude of ponzi schemes involving welfare and ‘retirement’ programs that require more and more people paying into the scheme to support the number of people sucking money out of the schemes and voting for the Usual Suspects.

Think about that next time you hear a bunch of hand-wringers lament the Population Crash. (Mostly the same people who were worrying about overpopulation half a century ago with ‘climate change’ meant a looming New Ice Age.)

National Review, which has sadly degenerated in the last fifty years.

When Republican lawmakers moved last year to end taxpayer funding for PBS and NPR, a constellation of media CEOs and experts warned that the cuts would result in the closure of dozens, possibly hundreds, of affiliate stations.

It has now been six months since President Trump signed a bill eliminating $1.1 billion in federal funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and the predicted newsroom Armageddon has yet to materialize.

In fact, of the more than 1,000 television and radio stations that make up the country’s public media system, nearly all remain operational.

“Vanishingly few” affiliates have closed down since last summer, according to the New York Times.

Read it.

To ensure that the tissue structures of biological samples are easily recognizable under the electron microscope, they are treated with a staining agent. The standard staining agent for this is uranyl acetate. However, some laboratories are not allowed to use this highly toxic and radioactive substance for safety reasons.

A research team at the Institute of Electron Microscopy and Nanoanalysis (FELMI-ZFE) at Graz University of Technology (TU Graz) has now found an environmentally friendly alternative: ordinary espresso.

Images of the samples treated with it were of equally good quality as images of comparative samples, which were prepared with uranyl acetate. The researchers have published their findings in the journal Methods.

You Can Build a Mainvrfame From the Things You Find At Home (Bill Sutton)

The Foundry.

In recent years, many parents have begun questioning long-standing assumptions about traditional education. Concerns about bureaucracy, one-size-fits-all curricula, and institutional failures have eroded confidence in the public school system for many families.

Some parents are also increasingly wary of ideological instruction in public schools, particularly when it comes to gender ideology and sex education.

While debate over education is healthy in our society, a growing number of families believe the system has become less responsive to individual needs and more influenced by political and administrative pressures.

It is little surprise, then, that parents are looking for alternatives. For many families, homeschooling has moved from the margins to the mainstream.

Michael Sartain: “Hating is free. That’s why broke people do it.”

Read it.

This post on X from a former special forces warrant officer indicates that what we see in MN is classic modern insurgency.

Read it.

The circular stone-cast tablet was discovered in the late 1800s from the 650 BC King Ashurbanipal ‘s underground library in Nineveh, Iraq.

Data processing, which was long believed to be an Assyrian tablet, mirrored the sky over Mesopotamia in 3300 BC and proved to be much more ancient Sumerian origin.

The tablet is the first astronomical instrument, the “Astrolabe.” It consists of a segmented, disk-shaped star chart with marked units of angle measure inscribed upon the rim.

Unfortunately considerable parts of the planisphere on this tablet are missing (approximately 40%), damage which dates to the sacking of Nineveh. The reverse of the tablet is not inscribed.

The Atlantic, a Voice of the Crust.

to hear some Silicon Valley insiders tell it, California is on the verge of economic suicide. This November, Californians will likely vote on a ballot initiative that would levy a one-off tax on the wealth of about 200 of the state’s richest residents. Garry Tan, the CEO of the start-up incubator Y Combinator, posted on X that the measure would “kill and eat the golden goose of technology startups in California.” Investors and tech executives are threatening to leave the state. Governor Gavin Newsom, who has been angling for a centrist presidential pivot, has vowed to “do what I have to do” to stop the initiative.

Sure, I believe that.

Many progressives, however, see the billionaire tax as a long-overdue effort to finally force the ultra-wealthy to pay their fair share. Senator Bernie Sanders, for example, calls it a “model that should be emulated throughout the country.” In their telling, hyperbolic claims about the death of innovation and entrepreneurship in California are a smoke screen for the fact that billionaires simply don’t want to pay higher taxes.

They keep bloviating about ‘their fair share’ but none of them will give you an exact definition of what ‘fair share’ means—they’re just sure that what’s now is not it. They also won’t explain why the current ‘share’ is not ‘fair’.

The essence of the progressive ideology is that progressives ought to be able to spend your money whether you like it or not. Progressives are thieves, pure and simple.

The unfortunate reality for progressive backers of the wealth tax is that what billionaires think about the policy, and how they react to it, will determine whether it succeeds. If voters approve the tax, they will be making a huge bet on billionaire psychology. That would be a very high-stakes wager indeed.

And the more they are assholes about it, the more billionaires will leave. Progressives are, in a free society, their own worst enemies.

the california wealth-tax idea originated as a response to a federal tax cut. Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act lowered taxes for corporations and rich individuals and paid for those cuts in part by reducing Medicaid spending. That left a roughly $20 billion annual shortfall in California’s health-care budget. If left unfilled, that could cause 1.6 million low-income Californians to lose their health care, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation. In response, one of the state’s largest health-care-employee unions teamed up with a group of progressive economists and lawyers to come up with a way to make up the difference: impose a one-off 5 percent wealth tax on California’s billionaires.

“Hold still while we pick your pocket.”

Read it.

Mainstream media outlets rushed to paint Alex Pretti as a blameless ICU nurse gunned down by heartless Border Patrol agents in Minneapolis on Saturday. They highlighted his work caring for veterans and seized on video snippets showing him holding a phone. The New York Times ran with that angle, running the headline “Man Killed by Federal Agents in Minneapolis Was Holding a Phone, Not a Gun,” and claimed that footage captured Pretti only with his phone in hand, insisting that agents had no reason to believe he was armed during their encounter.

Media outlets are also quick to point out that Pretti held a valid Minnesota concealed carry permit and legally owned the gun, as if that absolved him for his actions against the Border Patrol agents.

Others point out that he had no criminal record, just traffic tickets.

This, they argue, proves he was an innocent victim, not an agitator.

But what the mainstream media isn’t telling you is that Pretti wasn’t just some random bystander.

According to Jeanne Massey, a neighbor, Pretti was part of a “Signal ICE” group chat of volunteers who organized a sophisticated operation to track ICE activity in real time and alert each other when agents were in the area.

These folks patrol streets, blow whistles, alert residents, and film operations to disrupt arrests.

That puts him not on the sidelines but plugged into the very network that coordinated responses to federal enforcement operations.

Mother Jones profiled the group just last week.

The New Neo.

There is nothing simple about this case. I’ve been mulling it over and watching videos, and the only thing that’s clear to me is that the situation is murky and (as is often the case) people tend to see what they want to see or expect to see or what conforms to their pre-existing notions. I’ve read many things about it already that turn out to be untrue – or seemingly untrue.

Despite the plethora of videos, none of them show enough to come to a definitive conclusion. We don’t know exactly what led up to the confrontation, or exactly what Pretti was doing with his hands during it, or what was seen and understood by whom, or whether as the officer removed Pretti’s gun it misfired and that set off the fatal shooting in response to a misperception, or many of the most important things we would need to know to come to a strong conclusion about guilt or innocence.

I watched the following video to the bitter end, and although the speakers don’t come to any definite conclusions and it is extremely long, I think it’s valuable to watch at least some of it because it illustrates how very confusing the various videos of the shooting are. One thing that seems to be true is that whether Pretti’s weapon accidentally discharged (in the hands of the officer) as the first shot of the series is of great importance, because if that were the case it probably would absolve the officers of criminal although not civil liability.

Time to review the Chris Rock video, “How not to get your ass kicked by the police.” Minnesota could use some of that wisdom.

Read it.

Pork accounts for more than a third of the world’s meat, making pigs among the planet’s most widely consumed animals. They are also widely reviled: For about two billion people, eating pork is explicitly prohibited. The Hebrew Bible and the Islamic Koran both forbid adherents from eating pig flesh, and this ban is one of humanity’s most deeply entrenched dietary restrictions. For centuries, scholars have struggled to find a satisfying explanation for this widespread taboo. “There are an amazing number of misconceptions people continue to have about pigs,” says archaeologist Max Price of Durham University, who is among a small group of scholars scouring both modern excavation reports and ancient tablets for clues about the rise and fall of pork consumption in the ancient Near East. “That makes this research both frustrating and fascinating.”

Read it.

I had come here expecting that we would find ruin and neglect, toxicity and destitution. I expected Centralia to be an exemplar of the eerie: A place where once there had been a town, place of thriving life, and instead now was only absence, an emptiness, a void.

What we found instead, strangely, was beauty. Centralia, despite everything I’d been led to expect, was thriving.

Visitors find a similar situation at Chernobyl. Nature has ways of compensating for human ineptitude.

Locals see the story a little differently, though their version borrows from similar themes. Phil, a tour guide at Pioneer Tunnel in neighboring Ashland, pointed out that while the grim toil of the mines claimed many human lives, their closure left the valley with little else to offer. He explained how the families that didn’t leave Centralia were harassed, as government forces tried to drive them off their land. Those that stayed had to go to court to defend their right to live on this abandoned land, all because they wanted to keep the mineral rights to their property. So now, people like Phil assume that the government is just waiting them out. Once they’re gone, putting out the fire will be easy enough. “They’ll take all that red hot coals, but also they’re going to get that rich anthracite coal,” he told us. “And I’m sure they’ll sell that. But are the people or the relatives going to get anything? It’s very doubtful. It’ll probably go to the federal government. Or the coal baron, maybe?”

People have been carefully trained over my lifetime that when the government is here to help, it usually means they are her to help themselves to whatever you’ve got.