The Telegraph (UK).

First came Russia’s “turtle tank”, a metal shed rumbling across the battlefield. Then Ukraine laughed at the so-called “hairy tank”, coated in long, wavy metal wires.

Now the “dandelion tank” has arrived.

Moscow’s latest crude design, which features flexible metal rods arranged in branched layers, attempts to shield the body of the tank from the ever-present threat of small kamikaze drones.

Read it.

There are competing narratives about Wednesday’s ICE-involved shooting in Minneapolis. Some left-leaning corporate outlets focused on the fact that a woman was shot and killed by an ICE agent during a federal enforcement deportation operation, while other media, like the New York Post, highlighted that the woman, identified as 37-year-old Renee Nicole Good, was part of a left-wing group “Ice Watch” that mounted pressure campaigns on ICE agents on the ground.

Put aside all those viral videos on X; now Alpha News has obtained cellphone footage from what appears to be one of the ICE agents, and it provides a completely new perspective on what happened and why the ICE agent felt threatened enough to fire several shots at Good, killing the activist.

Read it.

Supermarket shelves have never been fuller, yet diets have become poorer. Across the world, food systems praised for their productivity now deliver an abundance of calories alongside widespread micronutrient deficiency, ecological collapse and rural precarity.

This is the outcome of an agricultural model that equates food security with yield and mass production with nourishment. Sustained by billions in subsidies, industrial agriculture increasingly resembles a welfare state for agribusiness and retail giants whose profits depend on public money.

Read it.

While today’s ADP report was a solid rebound from the worst monthly report in years (even if it missed expectations due to a sudden plunge in California payrolls), the same could not be said for the JOLTS job opening report that followed less than two hours later, and which was another epic disaster: for the month of November (recall JOLTS lags the payrolls report by a month), the US had only 7.146 million job openings, a huge drop from the 7.670 million in October (which was conveniently revised lower to 7.449 million) and the lowest since September 2024.

Pretty sad when we have to depend on government jobs programs to give us positive employment numbers.

I know nothing, nothiiiinnnnggg….

Read it.

I already support it; you don’t have to sell it to me.

Read it.

Trump’s successful “special military operation” in Venezuela has prompted a flurry of reactions from governments across the world.

Venezuela’s strategic Russian and Chinese partners predictably condemned the US’ capture of President Nicolas Maduro while the US’ EU junior partner released a statement that lacked any criticism of the US but also didn’t endorse its actions either.

Therein lies the hypocrisy that was just exposed by the US’ “special military operation” in Venezuela since the EU would have certainly condemned Russia’s hypothetical capture of Zelensky in the harshest language possible.

Their implied excuse for these double standards towards the US’ capture of Maduro is that he’s illegitimate, but Russia now deems Zelensky to be illegitimate too, so third parties’ assessments of other leaders’ legitimacy is ultimately subjective and this leads to the reality that was just exposed.

At the end of the day, Great Powers like the US (which is arguably still a superpower even if it was hitherto in decline till Trump’s return to office) always pursue their perceived interests but cloak them in the language of international law or norms, which is more palatable for the global public.

Welcome to the Real World.sd

Read it.

In 1971, the world got its first look at an arcade machine, playing the little-remembered space combat game Computer Space. A year later, we got the all-time classic Pong in arcade machine form, and the first ever home console, the Magnavox Odyssey.

In the decades preceding, researchers at various institutes created several experimental games, which paved the way for these commercial successes that spawned a ~$189 billion industry. But the games were not the first to be created. The game widely considered the first true computer game, as it was made for entertainment purposes only, was created by American physicist William Higinbotham in 1958.

Pooh. In 1970 I was playing a space-invaders type game on the CATTC NTDS computers on the USS John F. Kennedy (CVA-67) in Norfolk, Virginia. Our DS personnel were bored, and so….

Read it.

The UK government’s digital ID push is escalating into outright dystopia, with ministers privately floating the idea of assigning digital identities to newborns right alongside their health records.

In the U.S., we call them Social Security Numbers. Don’t leave home without it….

The New Neo.

It seems this was the culmination of months – or more? – of planning, with signals and warnings for Maduro to go into exile or else. Now we see the “or else.”

There are also rumors that it’s all staged and Maduro cooperated. I definitely don’t think that’s the case.He almost certainly could have absconded to one of his sponsor states instead. They may not be paradises, but they’re better than US prison.

I’d have put the start of adulthood at 25, where the insurance actuaries do, but yeah.

The Economist.

Prickly pear line the perimeters of brick-red fields. In a few there are crops, but in many the cactus is the only hint of green. Small children, who should be in school, herd Zebu cattle along dusty tracks. Women sell bags of charcoal outside flimsy wooden huts by the main road. It is the tail end of the dry season in southern Madagascar; locals are yearning for rain. They are short of cash and often hungry. They are also lonely.

Many people think loneliness is a first-world problem: that rich societies become atomised as people chase wealth rather than social connections. But surveys suggest this is wrong. Western, individualistic societies, where more people live alone and religion is marginal, tend to be less lonely. People in poor countries are much likelier to be lonely. And the loneliest region of all, surprisingly, is Africa, the home of ubuntu, the sociable notion that “people are people through other people.” In 2024 over a quarter of Africans surveyed said they had felt lonely the previous day.

The War Zone.

A major U.S. military operation, which included airstrikes and the use of special operations forces, resulted in the capture of Maduro.

…

CBS reports that Delta Force captured Maduro. They were very likely at the center of the operation, but it’s possible, if not probable, that other elements, including those from FBI, were also directly present during the operation.

I’ve thought hat since I was an undergraduate and had to listen to a lecture by James Tobin.

Dan Wang.

One way that Silicon Valley and the Communist Party resemble each other is that both are serious, self-serious, and indeed, completely humorless.

If the Bay Area once had an impish side, it has gone the way of most hardware tinkerers and hippie communes. Which of the tech titans are funny? In public, they tend to speak in one of two registers. The first is the blandly corporate tone we’ve come to expect when we see them dragged before Congressional hearings or fireside chats. The second leans philosophical, as they compose their features into the sort of reverie appropriate for issuing apocalyptic prophecies on AI. Sam Altman once combined both registers at a tech conference when he said: “I think that AI will probably, most likely, sort of lead to the end of the world. But in the meantime, there will be great companies created with serious machine learning.” Actually that was pretty funny.

It wouldn’t be news to the Central Committee that only the paranoid survive. The Communist Party speaks in the same two registers as the tech titans. The po-faced men on the Politburo tend to make extraordinarily bland speeches, laced occasionally with a murderous warning against those who cross the party’s interests. How funny is the big guy? We can take a look at an official list of Xi Jinping’s jokes, helpfully published by party propagandists. These wisecracks include the following: “On an inspection tour to Jiangsu, Xi quipped that the true measure of water cleanliness is whether the mayor would dare to swim in the water.” Or try this reminiscence that Xi offered on bad air quality: “The PM2.5 back then was even worse than it is now; I used to joke that it was PM250.” Yes, such a humorous fellow is the general secretary.

It’s nearly as dangerous to tweet a joke about a top VC as it is to make a joke about a member of the Central Committee.

Read it.

One cannot help but run into people who clearly fantasize about the following scenario: All the great geniuses of the past sit down and take some sort of culture-invariant IQ test, and then we get to line up the numbers and compare them, finally settling once and for all who was the greatest genius of humanity.

In this fantasy they imagine Voltaire in his study, finishing his fortieth cup of coffee (he used to drink around 50 a day), sharpening a #2 pencil at his desk, getting ready to fill in all those little bubbles. Is it A? Or D? Hmm, hasn’t been A in a while. . .

How the great geniuses of the past would do filling in these ovals perennially fascinates. Einstein would get a 160! Darwin a 180! Aristotle, 190! And while speculating about the numerical ranking of the long dead, IQ enthusiasts will refer quite regularly to IQs of 150 or even 200, presumably thinking that intelligence can actually be tracked at those numbers.

Read it.

Wireless technology and data being stored in “The Cloud” may lead you to think information is pinged around the globe via satellites. Only a very small portion is. Instant communication, like texts, phone calls and websites, is made possible by copper and fibre-optic undersea cables which carry data between countries.

97% of the internet travels through these cables. All the undersea fibre-optic cables across the world span approximately 1.2 million km (750,000 miles): combined they could wrap around Earth 30 times!

Subsea fibre-optic cables are critical infrastructures that support our global networks. They are essential for our communication, commerce, government and military functions because they securely transport messages and information. The importance of undersea cables means control or disruption of them can have political and economic implications.

In peace, they are a prime target for espionage.

In war, they are a prime target for destruction.

Take whatever action you deem appropriate.

Read it.

I recently overheard a conversation in a River Falls, Wisconsin, coffee shop that has stayed with me.

A person was venting to a friend about being forced to use AI—likely Microsoft Copilot—within a work spreadsheet. After several rounds of frustrating trial and error, she eventually gave up and finished the task manually. In the end, the “shortcut” had cost her more time than if she’d just done the work herself from the start.

To many, this looks like failure, but I see it as a green flag. It is a sign that the system is working exactly as it should: by keeping a human in the loop, much like a pilot in a cockpit. Being frustrated is proof, to me, they’re effectively using this amazing tool in the real world.

But if we want to phase out human-in-the-loop systems for AGI, there is one critical problem we must solve first—at least, if we care about society. Beyond the technical hurdles, the real challenge is taxes.

Governments are funded by people, not software. Our schools, roads, and healthcare systems rely on the taxation of human income. When a worker is removed from the equation, that tax base vanishes with them. At scale, the “efficiency” of AI creates a massive shortfall in public revenue. The results are predictable: crumbling infrastructure, reduced services, and an even heavier tax burden on the few workers who remain.

If you think that governments won’t figure out a way to tax them anyway, then you’re delusional.

Watch it.

Hint: Not much. Unfortunately, the people upon whom we are depending for information about this program are the same people who are responsible for the flying train wreck called F-35. So I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting for the U.S. to actually produce a plane that will beat the Russians and Chinese.

Communications of the ACM (Association for Computing Machinery).

Of course, the nternet makes some political activity easier and cheaper. But it does so for everyone. And if everybody speaks, who will be listened to?

And that underlines the chief problem with ‘democracy’ as a concept and especially with the way people (who ought to know better) deal with it.

The major premise of democracy is that every person’s vote is of the same value. There are various philosophical justifications for this, but the simple fact is that none of us is willing to concede that somebody else’s vote ought to be of more value than ours. The problem with that approach is that every one of us knows people whose vote, we are convinced, is in fact of less value than ours. This inherent contradiction between philosophical theory and actual reality is the root of every conflict over what ‘democracy really means’.

The cognitive dissonace between those two mental states is what causes most of the trouble in the modern world. It’s entertaining at times, but rarely useful.

Read it.

Researchers at UC San Francisco used the gene editing technology CRISPR to turn ordinary white fat cells into “beige” fat cells, which voraciously consume calories to make heat. The work is funded by the National Institute of Health (NIH).

Then, they implanted them near tumors the way plastic surgeons inject fat from one part of the body to plump up another. The fat cells scarfed up all the nutrients, starving most of the tumor cells to death. The approach even worked when the fat cells were implanted in mice far from the sites of their tumors.

The approach’s reliance on a common procedure could speed its use as a new form of cellular therapy.

New York Times Magazine, a Voice of the Crust.

It happened the first time over dinner. I was saying something to my husband, who grew up in Paris where we live, and suddenly couldn’t get the word out. The culprit was the “r.” For the previous few months, I had been trying to perfect the French “r.” My failure to do so was the last marker of my Americanness, and I could only do it if I concentrated, moving the sound backward in my mouth and exhaling at the same time. Now I was saying something in English — “reheat” or “rehash” — and the “r” was refusing to come forward. The word felt like a piece of dough stuck in my throat.

Other changes began to push into my speech. I realized that when my husband spoke to me in English, I would answer him in French. My mother called, and I heard myself speaking with a French accent. Drafts of my articles were returned with an unusual number of comments from editors. Then I told a friend about a spill at the grocery store, which — the words “conveyor belt” vanishing midsentence — took place on a “supermarket treadmill.” Even back home in New York, I found my mouth puckered into the fish lips that allow for the particularly French sounds of “u,” rather than broadened into the long “ay” sounds that punctuate English.

My mother is American, and my father is French; they split up when I was about 3 months old. I grew up speaking one language exclusively with one half of my family in New York and the other language with the other in France. It’s a standard of academic literature on bilingual people that different languages bring out different aspects of the self. But these were not two different personalities but two separate lives. In one version, I was living with my mom on the Upper West Side and walking up Columbus Avenue to get to school. In the other, I was foraging for mushrooms in Alsatian forests or writing plays with my cousins and later three half-siblings, who at the time didn’t understand a word of English. The experience of either language was entirely distinct, as if I had been given two scripts with mirroring supportive casts. In each a parent, grandparents, aunts and uncles; in each, a language, a home, a Madeleine.

It’s astonishing how many people who write for publication these days are the children of divorce.

Read it.

The most complex engineering of human cell lines ever has been achieved by scientists, revealing that our genomes are more resilient to significant structural changes than was previously thought.

Researchers from the Wellcome Sanger Institute, Imperial College London, Harvard University in the US and their collaborators used CRISPR prime editing to create multiple versions of human genomes in cell lines, each with different structural changes. Using genome sequencing, they were able to analyze the genetic effects of these structural variations on cell survival.

The research, published in Science, shows that as long as essential genes remain intact, our genomes can tolerate significant structural changes, including large deletions of the genetic code. The work opens the door to studying and predicting the role of structural variation in disease.

I happen to love fruitcake, myself. Don’t dare eat it, of course….

Read it.

In 2022, Dr Dawn Wright, a professor of geography and oceanography at Oregon State University, said humans are ‘irrevocably’ changing the planet.

When it comes to exploring the deep sea, unless you suffer from thalassophobia (the fear of large bodies of water), it can be quite fascinating.

But Dr Wright’s strange discovery proved we needed to understand our planet better to preserve it.

Enviro-Nazis won’t be happy until humans become extinct.

“Sitting in sediment at the bottom of the ocean at the Earth’s deepest point: a beer bottle. It had traveled more than 6.7 miles to the darkest depths of the Pacific, label still intact,” Dr Wright explained.

“This discarded trash had managed to reach an unsullied part of our world before we actually did – a symbol of how deeply and irrevocably humans are affecting the natural world.”

Taking to X, she also reinforced her belief that we need to protect the planet better.

I swear, she must think that humans are some alien species come here just to discard sandwich wrappers or something.

For what it’s worth, it looks like a Heineken.

Read it.

So hit the gym! Your kids will thank you later.

Read it.

Travel agents are the go-to example of an industry killed by the internet. And the numbers are brutal: US agents peaked at around 124,000 in 2000 and collapsed to under 40,000 by 2020 – a 70% drop. Retail locations fell from 34,000 to 13,000[1]. But that collapse took a decade. The ones who survived did it by going upmarket. I keep thinking about this when I look at what’s coming for software engineering – except this time, I don’t think we get ten years.

Read it.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement actions are disrupting the construction industry in South Texas.

Builders attribute it to a previous period of large-scale deportations as a warning of pending economic consequences.

Industry leaders say arrests at or near construction sites have caused many workers to stay home, slowing projects and tightening labor availability across the Rio Grande Valley.

ICE has arrested more than 9,100 people in South Texas since President Donald Trump took office, nearly one-fifth of related arrests statewide during that period, according to ICE data obtained through a public records request and analyzed by the Texas Tribune.

Gee,  I guess they’ll just have to hire Americans. What a hardship.

The Telegraph (UK).

A statue of the baby Jesus was beheaded at a church on Christmas Eve.

It happened at St Patrick’s Church in Edinburgh’s Old Town, one of the Scottish capital’s most important Catholic places of worship.

Church officials asked the congregation for “prayers for reparation” of the Nativity scene after the incident and said they would “bless the church again”.

Two visitors to the church are understood to have become distressed and taken the baby Jesus figure from the altar ahead of midnight Mass on Dec 24.

Police Scotland said inquiries were ongoing, and it was not believed to be a hate crime targeted at Catholics. The incident is understood to have been mental health-related.

The Telegraph (UK).

A former Veganuary cheerleader has defected to help run a meat-eating campaign.

Toni Vernelli, 54, was head of communications at Veganuary, the annual vegan diet challenge, for nearly six years, having spent decades fighting to end animal cruelty.

But she has now urged people to “forget” the campaign and go back to eating meat, claiming vegan dogma is “not only unhelpful but actually damaging to the fundamental goal of reducing animal suffering”.

Instead, she is promoting a challenge in which three competitive eaters will consume nothing but animal products for a whole day.

Veganuary, launched in 2014 and run by a UK non-profit, is an annual pledge where people give up meat and dairy for a month. Supporters say they want to see a “vegan world” which is kinder to animals and the environment.

But Ms Vernelli said diet change campaigning only prolongs the misery of factory farming because it alienates people who want to help, while putting an “upper limit” on the good they can do.

She has now joined the charity FarmKind, which is launching its own “Forget Veganuary” campaign urging people to give to animal welfare causes rather than changing their diet.

Q: How do you tell a vegetarian?
A: You don’t tell a vegetarian—the vegetarian tells you.

Watch it.

Apparently there are more Canadians who refuse to put up with Wokeness than in the other Usual Suspects such as Britain and Europe. The suggestion is that it could cause Canada to come apart like a Narrative Media “news” story.

Of course, all of these problems are caused by insane judges and politicians, and (unfortunately), like the poor, insane judges and politicians we have with us always.

Economic Times of India.

More than 550 employees at a Louisiana manufacturing firm received a combined $240 million after the company was sold, despite holding no equity. The payout followed a decision by the owner to share 15 percent of sale proceeds with staff who stayed through layoffs, downturns and uncertainty. The bonuses, averaging about $443,000, rewarded long-term loyalty and transformed lives while boosting the local economy.

Raptitude.

I’ve been reading Lord of the Rings for two months and I’m just at the end of the first part. It’s not because I’m not enjoying it. It’s one of the most enjoyable reading experiences I can remember.

From the beginning, I’ve read the whole thing aloud. I’ve found reading aloud helpful for staying engaged — limiting myself to mouth-speed rather than eye-speed means I won’t rush, miss important details, and then lose interest, which has always been a problem for me.

At first I was anxious to read a 1,500-page book this way, because it would take so long. But, as someone pointed out to me, if I’m enjoying it, why would I want to be done with it sooner?

So I tried slowing down even more, and discovered something. I slowed to a pace that felt almost absurd, treating each sentence as though it might be a particularly important one. I gave each one maybe triple the usual time and attention, ignoring the fact that there are hundreds of pages to go.

This leisurely pace made Middle-Earth blossom before my eyes. When I paused after each comma, and let each sentence ring for a small moment after the period, the events of the story reached me with more weight and strength. That extra time gave space for Tolkien’s images and moods to propagate in my mind, which they did automatically.

Some part of me still wanted to rush and get on with it, to make good time, to gloss over the songs and lore to get to Moria and Mount Doom and the other marquee moments of the story. But the more I ignored that impulse, the better the experience got.

By offering the book about triple the usual amount of attentiveness, I was getting about triple the storyness (i.e. meaning, engagement, literary pleasure). Whatever the thing is that I’m seeking when I pick up a novel in the first place, there’s much more of it available at this pace.

Cal Newport.

The recent ?announcement? that Netflix formalized a deal to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery’s television and film studios, as well as the HBO Max streaming service, got me thinking about an essay that Derek Thompson published on ?his ?Substack titled ?“Everything is Television.?”

“A spooky convergence is happening in media,” he begins. “Everything that is not already television is turning into television.”

Thompson then gives three examples of what he means:

1. Social Media is moving from offering connection to streaming videos (in ?court documents? from this summer, Meta admitted that only 7% of activity on their Instagram platform involves users following people they know).

2. Podcasts are migrating inexorably toward video format.

3. Even AI is shifting toward visual media with the launch of new products like ?OpenAI’s Sora? and Meta’s Vibes.

Television, of course, can mean many things. “When I say ‘everything is turning into television,’” Thompson clarifies, “what I mean is that disparate forms of media and entertainment are converging on one thing: the continuous flow of episodic video.”

Read it.

Just a few questions, as an example, that senior+ engineers ask:

1. What problem are we actually trying to solve? (Not what solution do we want, but what’s the underlying problem?)
2. Who’s the user here and what’s painful for them? (They try to be specific. “Users” isn’t an answer.)
3. What are we assuming that might be wrong? (Every plan has hidden assumptions.)
4. What happens if we’re wrong and ship this anyway? (How bad is the downside?)

Read it.

Perfect software isn’t the best software. It’s perfect simply because it does exactly what you want, how you want it, when you want it.

It isn’t big either. We have confused “good” with “big”. In the Silicon Valley lexicon, software is only valuable if it scales. It must serve millions. It must capture markets. It must grow continuously.

Perfect software offers a different kind of value: Sufficiency. It’s the virtue of requiring less, not because you lack ambition, but because you have met the need. While growth demands a constant state of hunger, sufficiency offers satiety. And perfect software delivers that because the moment you deem something perfect, you become content.

CATO.

Over half of Americans (55%) don’t know how Social Security is funded. Less than half (45%) know that today’s workers pay for current retirees, and that future workers will pay for their benefits when they retire. Nearly a quarter (23%) believe that their Social Security taxes are saved in a personal account for them. Another third (32%) say they don’t know how Social Security is funded.

It’s Free Government Money! What could possibly go wrong?

The Cato Institute’s August 2025 Social Security Survey of 2,200 Americans, conducted by Morning Consult, reveals that many Americans are deeply confused about how Social Security works, what it’s for, and what the future holds. Despite the program’s central role in retirement planning, the public lacks a basic understanding of how it’s funded or how much it pays.

And yet these people have a vote that is equal to yours. (By definition, half the population of any area are below average IQ.)

Watch it.

Warren Smith of the Secret Scholar Society podcast doesn’t treat Fuentes as a punching bag but tries to have an actual conversation with him, something I doubt you’ll have the opportunity to see anywhere else.

Why is everybody running around in circles and jumping up and down about Nick Fuentes, who is (let’s face it) a fairly fringe figure whose only real talent seems to be for winding up The Usual Suspects? Like Andrew Tate, Fuentes appears to be the New Osama Bin Laden, the boogeyman that the Left needs to leverage in order to get paid. Incomprehensible.

Welcome to the Real World of Disappointment, kid.