Read it.

Working retail is a great way to lose faith in the collective intelligence of our species.

Ah, those were the days….

Watch it.

Carl Benjamin (Sargon of Akkad) reviews the growing cultural clash that approaches.

The Register.

Gee, I wonder why.

But, the researchers found, there are roughly 6.1 million workers who “face both high exposure to LLMs and low adaptive capacity to manage a job transition.”

Paper-pushers who don’t actually make things that people need, and who can’t do that kind of work (“administrators”).

“Many of these workers occupy administrative and clerical jobs where savings are modest, workers’ skill transferability is limited, and reemployment prospects are narrower.”

This, in turn, means that they are more likely to face longer job searches, less chance of actually finding new employment, and “more significant relative earnings losses compared to other workers.”

And, if you haven’t guessed it, “Of these workers, 86 percent are women.”

Called it.

Read it.

While many Denver office tenants went remote or fled to Cherry Creek or the ’burbs in recent years, law firm Ballard Spahr did the opposite.

It stayed downtown, though it swapped out its old headquarters for a newer spot a block away at 1800 Larimer in August.
“It was more about the amenities,” said Damon O. Barry, office manager partner, as he listed features like a full gym with towel service, a green space on the second floor, proximity to Union Station and lobby security. “My goal was to have a space that folks want to come into.”

But a sign of the times was that the company opted for leasing less space. Its new 19,000-square-foot office is one-third smaller than its prior home at 17th Street Plaza. No, the 60-person company isn’t shrinking, Barry said. It’s growing. There’s hybrid options and “hoteling” desks, available to whomever is in the office that day. This is about efficiency.

Yeah. Efficiency. No mention of how many may be relocating to less Woke Red states.

Read it.

NATO General Secretary Mark Rutte and EU leaders from the Arctic bordering states hold a panel discussion at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. As NATO General Secretary Rutte outlines the reality of the situation with a full defense of President Trump’s position, he remarks to the audience, “I’m not popular with you right now because I defend Donald Trump, but I really believe we can be happy that he’s here”.

Quillette.

Over the long arc of modern history, technology has been one of the most effective engines of women’s liberation—independently of the attitudes or intentions of the mostly male people who built it. From washing machines and telephones to reproductive technologies such as IVF, technological changes have expanded women’s autonomy by enabling their education, paid work, entrepreneurship, and personal freedoms. By reducing the burden of physical labour needed to enable a household to survive and function, these advances have loosened the link between sex and economic dependence. In emerging economies grappling with energy poverty, the pattern is even starker: electrification has proven to be among the few reliable forces capable of freeing women from gruelling labour, while sharply reducing the risks of childbirth, early childhood mortality, and maternal death.

The scale of this transformation is difficult to overstate. For most of human history, 1–2 percent of women died as a result of pregnancy or childbirth, making reproduction one of the leading causes of female death. Today, in many high-income countries, maternal mortality has fallen to under one death per 10,000 births. Child mortality shows a similar pattern. Globally, the share of children who die before the age of five has fallen by more than half over the past few decades alone, largely due to advances in sanitation, vaccination, antibiotics, and neonatal care. These declines were not driven by shifts in attitude or ideology, but by technological interventions that made survival routine rather than exceptional.

Feminism is a political movement, while technology is a set of tools. Yet, over the past two centuries, the most reliable driver of women’s autonomy has not been ideological persuasion or legal decree. Technology has accomplished what moral exhortation rarely can: it has changed the incentives. Modern technologies—particularly those that reduce physical strength requirements, expand access to information, and automate domestic labour—have done more to advance women’s bargaining power than most explicitly feminist political movements, precisely because they alter the underlying constraints of human life rather than attempting to moralise them away. Moral attitudes fluctuate, laws can be ignored, and cultural norms can resist change. Constraints, once relaxed, can rarely be tightened again. Feminist outcomes are best measured, then, by the extent to which women gain real autonomy, safety, and choice in their daily lives.

Daily Record (UK).

We’ve all experienced being greeted by our loud alarm clock what feels like 20 minutes after we’ve shut our eyes. But whilst it’s normal for us to wake up every now and again during the night, many of us do not know what’s normal and what’s not.

Research published in the Journal of Psychosomatic Research discovered that we’re more nocturnal than we might imagine, with a third of people fully waking during the night at least three times weekly. Meanwhile, separate research indicated that nearly a quarter of people wake at least once nightly.

However, our internal body clock naturally shifts as we age – resulting in more frequent night-time awakenings. Typically, we experience brief micro-awakenings approximately 20 times each night, though these are usually so fleeting that we don’t recall them.

Country Squire Magazine (UK).

Look around you. Cast your eye across the sclerotic state of our nation – the rudderless ship of government, the suffocating blanket of nanny-state regulation, the timid hand-wringing in the face of genuine threats, and the sheer, unadulterated dullness of it all. We are governed by managerial technocrats, men and women whose greatest ambition is to navigate a focus group, whose boldest vision extends to a new cycle lane or a tax on meat. They speak in sanitised platitudes, their spines seemingly replaced by polling data. In this landscape of the mediocre, one’s soul aches for a figure of verve, of audacity, of sheer chutzpah. We need, in short, a Sir Francis Drake.

We in the U.S. suffer from the same mealy-minded ruling class, but we actually have Trump, who is as close to a Sir Francis Drake as the modern world is capable of producing.

Read it.

1. People communicate most honestly through jokes. Pay attention to them.
2. If you can’t refuse something, it owns you.
3. Fear of being cringe will stop you living fully. Get over it.
4. Don’t take criticism from someone you wouldn’t take advice from.
5. Expect no applause for telling the truth. Sometimes doing the right thing costs you – friendships, comfort, peace. But always pay the price without question.
6. Whatever scenario you’re in, just act like you belong.
7. The lazy person works twice as hard.
8. Curiosity is a superpower.
9. Honesty without kindness is brutality. Default to kindness. Though know when to be firm.
10. Life never meets your youthful expectations. As an adult, you need to learn to find joy nonetheless.

….

The Register.

The UK government is investing in a defense-focused degree course to train both civilian students and soldiers to become drone technology specialists. However, it’s only targeting a small number of people.

According to the Ministry of Defence (MoD) and the Department for Education (DfE), this new course will open for enrolment at the New Model Institute for Technology and Engineering (NMITE) in Hereford in the west of England from September this year.

The degree course forms part of a broader effort to deliver on the aspirations outlined in the Strategic Defence Review, published in mid-2025, to enhance the capabilities of the British Army through AI, drones, and autonomous systems.

By building a pipeline of homegrown talent with specialized science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) skills, the MoD hopes to address critical workforce gaps while aiming to push the UK’s expertise in next-generation military capabilities.

As is often the case with much-trumpeted initiatives, the actual amount of funding made available – a £240,000 (about $322,000) investment from the British Army – hardly seems commensurate with the government’s ambitions for it.

The three-year course aims to train 15 civilian students and up to five soldiers each year to become drone technology specialists.

British degree programs, unlike those in the U.S., ordinarily take three years.

Hereford is where the headquarters of the Special Air Service is located.

Read it.

Apparently there is a furor over something Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins said regarding inflation. It seems she recommended that Americans eat a “three dollar meal” and gave an example consisting of chicken, broccoli, a corn tortilla and one other item. The internet went crazy – when doesn’t it – suggesting this was impossible. Even the harpies on The View said so. ( I guess they asked their personal chefs) I know that Bidenflation pushed prices up 21%, but $3 seemed very doable. I popped open the app from my local grocery store here in NJ – Shop Rite. Let’s see.

Quillette.

Hitler left blood. Richard III left bones. Lenin left an entire body, preserved like a specimen.

For centuries, historians and biographers have understood the powerful by scrutinising their words and letters, dissecting their decisions, and weighing the testimony of those they governed. But the recent rise of ancient DNA research has opened unsettling possibilities for analysing the actions of our rulers both past and present on the basis of their biology. This new perspective complicates but does not replace traditional interpretation; it could challenge old assumptions or further reinforce them. More significantly, however, genetics offers a tantalising—and possibly distorting—shortcut to understanding the minds that have shaped, or are now shaping, our world.

Ancient DNA (aDNA) analysis has moved far beyond tracing human ancestry and patterns of migration. Over the last decade, it has become a tool for detailed personal reconstruction, revealing previously impossible information about past individuals, including their health, diet, relationships, and physical appearance. And aDNA can now increasingly provide clues—sometimes surprising ones—not just about the bodies of the long-dead, but also about traits linked to neurological or behavioural tendencies.

BBC, a Voice of the Crust.

Some 100,000 of these small dives are hidden in plain sight across Japan. Now, travellers are finally discovering these locals-only hangouts – and the beloved “mamas” who run them.

I didn’t plan on having my fortune read by a matchmaking “mama” on my most recent visit to Tokyo. But after climbing to the second floor of a cozy sunakku (snack bar) called Aeru in the Shinbashi neighbourhood, the proprietress and owner, Urara, smiled coyly as she pulled a Knight of Wands from her tarot deck.

“You’re craving passion and protection… in a man,” Urara told me, as I nibbled chilli-flavoured rice crackers and deep-fried dough sticks slathered in brown sugar.

“I’ll be sure to let my husband know that,” I replied with a wry smile.

Read it.

Around 2,000 strange tunnels have been found around central Europe. These aren’t like the well-known catacombs of Paris or Rome. Known as the erdstall, these passages are extremely narrow, never more than two feet (60 centimetres) wide nor high enough for an adult to walk in, and sometimes the passages become seemingly impossibly narrow, as small as 16 inches (40 centimetres) in diameter. Determining their age and purpose is made difficult by the fact that almost no archaeological evidence has been found inside any of them. A ploughshare was found in one, millstones in a couple others, but apart from that the erdstall are eerily empty. Carbon analyses of coal and pottery fragments found within point to construction dates of around 900 to 1200 AD, but no written records from the Middle Ages mention the erdstall’s existence.

Read it.

On the western flank of the Hoover Dam stands a little-understood monument, commissioned by the US Bureau of Reclamation when construction of the dam began in 01931. The most noticeable parts of this corner of the dam, now known as Monument Plaza, are the massive winged bronze sculptures and central flagpole which are often photographed by visitors. The most amazing feature of this plaza, however, is under their feet as they take those pictures.

The plaza’s terrazzo floor is actually a celestial map that marks the time of the dam’s creation based on the 25,772-year axial precession of the earth.

Read it.

President Donald Trump drew cheers Monday night as he attended the College Football Playoff National Championship game between Indiana and Miami.

Trump was spotted in a suite during the pregame festivities with his daughter Ivanka Trump and several of his grandchildren at Hard Rock Stadium in South Florida.

As the national anthem was performed, the president waved to the crowd, prompting applause from fans inside the packed stadium.

Daily Record (UK).

A woman who adopted her niece after her sister was jailed for seven years has been praised online for changing the child’s name as soon as the adoption was finalised

Read it.

Well, first time that they know about it, anyway….

It was a late Sunday afternoon like any other on San Francisco’s Alcatraz Island. The day was winding down, and Aidan Moore, a guest relations employee for Alcatraz City Cruises, was at the dock of the tourist attraction helping visitors disembark. Suddenly, one of the tourists approached him, wide-eyed: They had just seen a coyote swimming to shore, something that has never been recorded before.

Read it.

n May 2017 a sculpture was displayed at the Moscow Higher School of Economics, believe it or not, in honour of the great secular-rational god Peer Review. The sculpture takes the form of a die displaying on its five visible sides the possible results of review — “Accept”, “Minor Changes”, “Major Changes”, “Revise and Resubmit” and “Reject”.

Peer review. What is it? Why does it matter? Where did it come from? How old is it?

A fairly solid academic article – Noah Moxham and Aileen Fyfe, ‘The Royal Society and the Prehistory of Peer Review, 1665-1965’, published in The Historical Journal 61 (2018), pp. 863-889 – begins with an untruth stated by the House of Commons committee on Science and Technology in 2011.

In one form or another, peer review has always been regarded as crucial to the reputation and reliability of scientific research.

Always? Fact-check: False. It’s a lie, or an error. Apparently, many people think that peer review was invented in the 17th century. Not so.

Read it.

The rise and spread of AI brings along endless discussions of what constitutes intelligence. A debate which, even if we limit ourselves to computer science, goes back not just to Weizenbaum’s Eliza, but to Turing and von Neumann.

It is also a debate that technical people should not abandon to others. Scientists and engineers are often wary of philosophizing, preferring problem-solving and action. The risk, however, is to relinquish the discussion to people who do not necessarily understand the technology. Current discussions of AI put this phenomenon on display. A typical example is the definition of intelligence. As I will discuss in this post, in the hope of helping to clarify and focus current debates, the source of many disagreements is that people rely, often implicitly, on two radically different notions of “intelligence.”

Read it.

When researchers at Emory University in Atlanta trained mice to fear the smell of almonds (by pairing it with electric shocks), they found, to their consternation, that both the children and grandchildren of these mice were spontaneously afraid of the same smell. That is not supposed to happen. Generations of schoolchildren have been taught that the inheritance of acquired characteristics is impossible. A mouse should not be born with something its parents have learned during their lifetimes, any more than a mouse that loses its tail in an accident should give birth to tailless mice.

If you are not a biologist, you’d be forgiven for being confused about the state of evolutionary science. Modern evolutionary biology dates back to a synthesis that emerged around the 1940s-60s, which married Charles Darwin’s mechanism of natural selection with Gregor Mendel’s discoveries of how genes are inherited. The traditional, and still dominant, view is that adaptations – from the human brain to the peacock’s tail – are fully and satisfactorily explained by natural selection (and subsequent inheritance). Yet as novel ideas flood in from genomics, epigenetics and developmental biology, most evolutionists agree that their field is in flux. Much of the data implies that evolution is more complex than we once assumed.

Some evolutionary biologists, myself included, are calling for a broader characterisation of evolutionary theory, known as the extended evolutionary synthesis (EES). A central issue is whether what happens to organisms during their lifetime – their development – can play important and previously unanticipated roles in evolution. The orthodox view has been that developmental processes are largely irrelevant to evolution, but the EES views them as pivotal. Protagonists with authoritative credentials square up on both sides of this debate, with big-shot professors at Ivy League universities and members of national academies going head-to-head over the mechanisms of evolution. Some people are even starting to wonder if a revolution is on the cards.

Jean-Baptiste Lamarck is grinning from beyond the grave.

Read it.

If you’re of a certain age, you probably remember the essay The Cathedral and the Bazaar. The TL;DR was that old open source was the cathedral of exclusive developers and groups. Then the Bazaar showed up (which was the Linux Kernel for example) and that freed us from the shackles of the cathedral.

Except if we look at how things evolved, it wasn’t actually a bazaar. It was a bunch of roadside churches that are now megachurches. But there is still a bazaar, and it’s holding up our modern infrastructure.

Back in the early days there was a person named esr. Don’t look him up, he’s not exactly role model material. [Eric S. Raymond—Who doesn’t know that?] He didn’t like some people who called themselves GNU. Which is an acronym for “Gnu’s not Linux”. The GNU project was also started by a person who isn’t role model material. [Richard Stallman] esr was big mad that GNU wouldn’t just take any open source contribution, you had to follow their rules. But in Linux there were no rules!!!

Well, except all the rules a person named Linus made up. History will probably remember him as LTT, “Linus The Torvalds”.

But anyway, so esr told us not using GNU was cool and we should all just create whatever we wanted. And this mostly happened because it’s what everyone was already doing. There is an obscene amount of open source. Most of it is on GitHub now, which is owned by Microsoft. Who we haven’t mentioned in this story, but they hated Linux more than a toddler hates naps. After being visited by 3 ghosts one evening, they decided to like Linux and open source. It’s a long complex story but it could be summed up as if you can’t beat them, join them. But that’s not important right now.

Read it.

It is harder to automate harvesting of lettuce than to send a human to the moon, to get any product in the world shipped to you within a few hours, to get vaccines for mumps, chicken pox, etc, to get a computer and connectivity in almost every person’s pocket, and many others.

I had the privilege to visit multiple harvesting operations during my visit to Yuma, Arizona, last week. I also had the chance to connect with other players in the ecosystem who have worked on various aspects of the problem.

These included forward-thinking Farm Labor Contracting (FLC) companies, local manufacturers, AgTech adoption services companies, research institutions, and, of course, many growers, shippers, and packers. Just as with any population, I encountered people with extremely strong opinions about how things should be done!

Harvesting lettuce (and many other specialty crops) is still very much a majority human-driven endeavor.

Watch it.

Apparently China has a “cosplay boyfriend industry”.

When Chinese girls say, “I don’t need no man”—well, maybe they don’t.

This all takes money, of course, but money talks louder in China (and always has), and what (really) can you do with money in a Communist country (if they let you have it) than consumption spending? It’s not as if you’re going to run for office.

Daily Record (UK).

After being inspired by the film ‘Crocodile Dundee’, an American model named Ginger Meadows decided to explore the Australian Outback for herself, a decision that tragically ended in disaster.

The 24-year-old from Snowmass Village in Colorado, a popular ski resort very different to the arid lands of Darwin in the Northern Territory.

On March 29, 1987, she and her friend Jane Burchett embarked on a journey to visit King’s Cascade aboard a luxury boat, the Lady G. After their Australian adventure, they planned to travel to Papua New Guinea.

The boat, captained by Bruce Fitzpatrick and a small crew, arrived at the stunning yet infamous waterfall known for its crocodile population. Despite warnings about the dangerous creatures inhabiting the water, Ginger and Jane chose to take a risk and go for a swim.

Evolution is a stone cold bitch.

Scott Alexander of Astral Codex Ten.

Thanks to everyone who sent in condolences on my recent death from prostate cancer at age 68, but that was Scott Adams. I (Scott Alexander) am still alive1.

Still, the condolences are appreciated. Scott Adams was a surprisingly big part of my life. I may be the only person to have read every Dilbert book before graduating elementary school. For some reason, 10-year-old-Scott found Adams’ stories of time-wasting meetings and pointy-haired bosses hilarious. No doubt some of the attraction came from a more-than-passing resemblance between Dilbert’s nameless corporation and the California public school system. We’re all inmates in prisons with different names.

But it would be insufficiently ambitious to stop there. Adams’ comics were about the nerd experience. About being cleverer than everyone else, not just in the sense of being high IQ, but in the sense of being the only sane man in a crazy world where everyone else spends their days listening to overpaid consultants drone on about mission statements instead of doing anything useful. There’s an arc in Dilbert where the boss disappears for a few weeks and the engineers get to manage their own time. Productivity shoots up. Morale soars. They invent warp drives and time machines. Then the boss returns, and they’re back to being chronically behind schedule and over budget. This is the nerd outlook in a nutshell: if I ran the circus, there’d be some changes around here.

Watch it.

hoe_math explains what’s behind the Renee Good situation.

Read it.

When Secretary of State Marco Rubio stood before reporters on Jan. 7 to discuss the military operation that took place in Venezuela four days prior, he added another element of intrigue. He planned to meet with Danish officials this week to discuss purchasing the world’s largest non-continental island: Greenland.

…

When Rubio sits with Danish leaders for those first discussions, he will have entered upon diplomatic deliberations that stretch back to the Andrew Johnson administration. The first inquiry to purchase Greenland from the Danes came in 1868 from Secretary of State William Seward. America had recently purchased a tundra to its northwest: Alaska. That purchase in 1867 was initially mocked as “Seward’s Folly” by the press, but of course, after the discovery of gold and oil, Seward’s decision was more than justified. Nonetheless, Congress proved disinterested in the icy territory to its northwest.

Read it.

The driving ethos of academia, “publish or perish,” is fighting for its life.

The requirement that scholars constantly publish or face academic ruin has been considered the primary engine of scientific discovery for decades. But a growing movement of universities and researchers is trying to banish the practice to the archives, saying it has perverted the pursuit of knowledge and eroded the public’s trust in science.

Reformers at top universities in Europe and the U.S., including Cambridge, Sorbonne, and UC Berkeley, say this traditional system of advancement has led to an explosion in the growth of low-quality research, with little meaningful impact on academic fields or society. It has also sparked the spread of fraudulent research, as “paper mills” churn out fake articles for sale to academics seeking to pad their CVs.

Read it.

The relationship between energy consumption and national wealth is one of history’s most consistent patterns.

From coal-fired Britain to oil-powered America to today’s renewable energy leaders, access to abundant, affordable energy has been the foundation of economic prosperity. This correlation isn’t coincidental — it’s mechanical. Energy powers industry, transportation, communication, and virtually every productive activity that generates wealth.

The Industrial Revolution provides history’s clearest demonstration. Britain’s dominance in the 18th and 19th centuries directly correlated with its exploitation of coal reserves. Coal powered steam engines, which mechanized textile production, iron smelting, and transportation. Britain’s GDP per capita increased roughly 10-fold between 1750 and 1900, precisely tracking its exponential increase in coal consumption.

Nations without coal access — or unwilling to industrialize — remained agrarian and poor. The energy-wealth gap widened dramatically during this period, creating the modern developed-developing world divide. As an aside, this is how a nation with crooked teeth and zero cuisine could go about bullying and colonizing much of the world.

Watch it.

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

Just in case you are wondering.

Read it.

itchen work is all about proportions: sometimes the recipe is for four servings but you need six; maybe the recipe calls for 80 g of butter but you only have 57 g, so you have to adjust the other ingredients to match.

We could use an electronic calculator to figure out the rescaled amounts, but a slide rule makes it so much easier. The picture above was taken while following a recipe that called for 2 tsp of baking powder, and I wanted to make as large a batch as I could given the remaining 3.3 tsp of baking powder I had – a proportion of 2:3.3. You can see the slide rule is set to a proportion of 2:3.3 because – if you open the image in a new tab to make it larger – the number 2 on the C scale (on the bottom of the sliding middle part) is above 3.3 on the D scale just below.

But wait, the number 1 on the C scale is also just above 1.65 on the D scale. And 14 (or, if you will, 1.4, since with slide rules we ignore decimal points) on the C scale is above 23.1 on the D scale. Indeed. It’s set to those proportions too, because they are the same proportion. This is what makes the slide rule so powerful.

You can also do this in Excel, which is probably easier to find than a slide rule.

Read it.

Oversight Project President Mike Howell joined “The Signal Sitdown” this week to discuss a new force analysis conducted by The Oversight Project into the ICE-involved shooting of a woman in Minnesota.

“Our team of career law enforcement has carefully reviewed all available evidence and has cleared the officer,” the force analysis reads from the Oversight Project, which has more than 60 years of law enforcement experience on its team. “The ICE officer in question is not only innocent, but was entirely justified in his actions. We pray that the far-left comes to their senses and ends this violence.”

Renne Good, 37, was shot last week by an ICE officer after allegedly attempting to run him over in Minneapolis. Within hours, thousands of protestors gathered, and local lawmakers called for ICE to leave the city.

“Immediately after that event, every anti-American liberal wacko became a ‘use of force’ expert, right? You have a lot like Omar [Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn.] and others saying this is murder and all the Democrats saying this is murder,” Howell said. “It’s just incredibly frustrating to watch that because of the effect it has on a population.”

Through these claims’ lawmakers, like Omar, have made, they have convinced this “mentally ill and unhinged population” that you can attempt to block a federal officer from doing their job. Omar did not respond to a request for comment from The Daily Signal.

“They’ve called for the violence against the ice officers,” Howell said. “And now they’re use of force experts too.”

Read it.

Let’s pretend you are a liberal living in a red state. If you feel aggrieved about the condition of the world and believe that conservatives are to blame, you can find a few like-minded souls, print up some signs covered in half-clever phrases, and go protest. In most cases, unless you chain yourself to a railing on the courthouse steps or attack the police, you will usually be ignored.

That’s democracy, a system under which 51% of the people can pee in the soup of the other 49% and the latter can’t do a thing about it—unless they have a Constitution like that of the U.S., which most countries don’t, the fools.

On the flip side, let’s pretend you are a conservative living in a deep blue state. If you don’t like the school policy, E.V. mandates, high electricity prices, or restrictive gun laws, and you dare to complain, not only will you not be ignored, but you might be harassed, shunned, or canceled. Your solution to the hard blue insanity is a four-letter word: move.

And that’s the difference between the Left and the Right. When the Left protests, the Right ignore them. When the Right protests, the Left responds with violence.

Now let’s pretend you live in a state with a blue megalopolis somewhere over the horizon, but you don’t want to move. Let’s also pretend you have lived in your community all of your life and have roots there — a job or a farm or a business that would be difficult to replicate somewhere else. Why should you suffer because once upon a midnight dreary, councilors to a long dead king or a few drunk senators drew a line on a map that ignored rational boundaries?

And once those boundaries are drawn, you’re stuck. Current boundaries can depend on everyone who has a vested interest in the status quo, and that’s enough. Absent something like the Civil War, which is the only way West Virginia could even hope to split off from Virginia, you’re stuck.

Ever since the founding of the republic, various groups and political movements have sought to redraw state boundaries. Some have been successful. Maine was originally part of Massachusetts, and the states of Kentucky and West Virginia were created from land originally part of Virginia. Other partitions to existing boundaries have been suggested, but none has been adopted. The reason is that the Constitution requires both the blessings of the partitioned state and the U.S. Congress.

Ask yourself a simple question. Why would any state governor or legislature willingly give up territory if it is not forced to? The serfs — excuse me, taxpayers — there help balance the state budget. How they feel about their lives or the number of potholes in their roads is secondary to ensuring that state budgets are met and the state programs, even those for non-citizens, continue.

Which is why discussions such as these are moot. Sure, I enjoy them as much as anybody, but NOTHING WILL EVER HAPPEN.

Read it.

If you went searching for the origins of meaning, you would probably start with brains, languages, and culture. You would not start with twenty enzymes whose name looks like the result of a keyboard being sat on. Aminoacyl-tRNA synthetases—aaRSs, whose acronym is almost as unwieldy as their name—are widely regarded as the least glamorous molecules in biology. Students meet them once in a lecture and immediately move on with their lives.

Yet tucked into their protein folds is one of the deepest stories in biology. Long before organisms competed, before genomes condensed into chromosomes, this small community of molecules learned to coordinate. They did not evolve muscles or membranes. They evolved something stranger: a way of agreeing what patterns should mean.

Textbooks invite you to think of the genetic code as a neat chart—“AUG” means methionine, “UUU” means phenylalanine—as though the mapping were imprinted into the structure of matter. But a codon is simply a sequence of three nucleotides, a pattern. Nothing inherent in “AUG” connects it to methionine. On a comet or in a prebiotic pond, a triplet of bases has no meaning at all.

Meaning for codons appears only inside a working translation system, in which some entities reliably enforce patterns. In cells, those entities are aaRSs. An aaRS is the physical bridge that bonds a specific amino acid to its matching transfer RNA (tRNA). They do not think, but each of them enacts a rule. Together, they stabilise a correlation that matters. If DNA is a script, aaRSs are the actors.

The American Mind.

At the time of his death in the summer of 1987, James Burnham was falling into obscurity. Today, though, his work has surged rapidly in prominence on the Right, especially among some of Donald Trump’s most ardent supporters. The reasons for this merit close attention.

At one time, Burnham was widely known as one of America’s sharpest Marxist intellectuals. His most recent biographer, intellectual historian David T. Byrne, ably captures the young Burnham’s contradictions in James Burnham: An Intellectual Biography: a professor of philosophy at New York University, unapologetically bourgeois and completely in his element at black-tie dinner parties, he could respectfully engage Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas. Yet he was also a militant Marxist and a trusted protégé of Leon Trotsky, whom he met and befriended in the 1930s. Distraught over the mass unemployment that was then sweeping across the United States, he admired the ferocious determination of the Marxist revolutionaries who promised an overthrow of America’s supposedly irredeemable capitalist system. Byrne writes that he “loved the idea of violent revolution.”

Yet Burnham was too intelligent and humane to remain impressed with the Soviets for very long. In 1940, his life took a decisive turn when he broke with Marxist-Leninism. Trotsky and his acolytes denounced him as a nefarious traitor. But Burnham would go on to compose what Byrne correctly identifies as “two of the most successful political works of the 1940s”: The Managerial Revolution (1941) and The Machiavellians (1943). He became a public intellectual, appearing regularly in journals of the Left-liberal New York intelligentsia such as the Partisan Review. He was even recommended by George Kennan to help with anti-Communist efforts at the Office of Strategic Services, the forerunner of the CIA.

The New York Times, a Voice of the Crust.

Beef tallow, a fat that both cardiologists and the federal government told Americans to avoid for nearly half a century, has become an unexpected breakout star in the new federal dietary guidelines.

Folow the Science! Except when it changes … then Follow the New Science!

We’re from the government, and we wouldn’t steer you wrong. (Right….)

Sometimes the old ways are best.

The rendered beef fat has been quietly growing in popularity over the past few years among cooks who like how it crisped fries and doughnuts, beauty influencers who smooth it on their skin and others who favor it for high-fat diets or believe it’s healthier than oil pressed from seeds.

On Thanksgiving in 2024, it was thrust onto the national stage. A barefoot Robert F. Kennedy Jr. pulled a turkey from a vat of boiling beef tallow and declared, “This is how we cook the MAHA way,” referring to the “Make America Healthy Again” movement he leads.

If Hindus don’t like it they can go back where they came from.

Read it.

Few arguments are as self-evident as this one: To learn about some place, you should travel there; traveling makes you learned, and the learned are well traveled. But as so often with truisms, this is not true. I claim that those who stay at home and occasionally read about foreign places on the internet are better informed than those who go somewhere far away on vacation.

To test this theory, try the following experiment. Ask someone who just spent 10 minutes on the Wikipedia article for Turkey for an interesting fact about the country, then ask someone who just came back from a 10 day vacation to Istanbul. Probably both will tell you something equally interesting, with the former being more generally relevant and the latter being more charming or topical. Of course this is wildly unfair—we should give the web surfer 10 days of reading time and ?100,000 to spend as well, but they simply don’t need it to win.

Back in the Good Old Day, when only about 10 percent of the population underwent any schooling, and those were upper class people (or people who wanted to become upper class people) who would have an outsized effect on what direction their society would take, education (in the sense that most humanities professors would use the term) was a good thing. Travel was considered part of that process, certainly in the age of the Grand Tour (which has degenerated into the modern Gap Year). But the advent of pervasive technology and the world that depended on it has converted ‘education’ per say into just a synonym for ‘training’, from which (arguably) more people have the ability to profit.

Read it.

Not content with launching a dizzying cascade of international conflicts, Trump just lobbed a nuke at the Fed.

While Trump’s vendetta against the Fed’s Lisa Cook set for a January showdown before the Supreme Court, the Trump admin dramatically raised the stakes on Sunday when the NYT first reported, and minutes later Fed Chair Jerome Powell confirmed that the US central bank had been served grand jury subpoenas from the Justice Department threatening a criminal indictment, in what Bloomberg said was a dramatic escalation of the Trump administration’s attacks on the Fed.

As the NYT first reported, the US attorney’s office in the District of Columbia has opened a criminal investigation into Powell over the central bank’s renovation of its Washington headquarters and whether the Fed Chair lied to Congress about the scope of the project. The inquiry, which includes an analysis of Powell’s public statements and an examination of spending records, was approved in November by Jeanine Pirro, a longtime ally of President Trump who was appointed to run the office last year, the NYT sources said.

Attorney General Pam Bondi has directed US attorneys offices to look into cases of potential taxpayer abuse, said one of the NYT sources. In comments broadcast by NBC, Trump said that the DOJ’s Fed subpoenas “nothing to do with interest rates” and denied any involvement in the legal matter.

Read it.

It is generally acknowledged that the Baby Boom generation (of which I am a member) has been the most successful, socioeconomically speaking, in the history of this planet, and the prospects for the generations following to match or surpass us are not looking good. As a confirmation of the disparity, I recently read that while Baby Boomers make up approximately 20% of the current US population, they possess more than 50% of the wealth.

In speaking with others of my generation, I have come to realize that very few Baby Boomers have even a modicum of insight as to how that success happened. The typical pabulum that I get from my peers is that they got their education and worked hard, implying that it should be no different for the younger generations.