Quanta magazine.

The standard sperm-meets-egg story posits that sperm cells are hardly more than bundles of shrink-wrapped DNA with tails. Their mission is simple: Deliver a father’s genes into a mother’s egg for sexual reproduction. Just about all other aspects of a developing embryo, including its cellular and environmental components, have nothing to do with dad. Those all come from mom.

But nearly two decades of studies from multiple independent labs threaten to rewrite that story. They suggest that dad’s gametes shuttle more than DNA: Within a sperm’s minuscule head are stowaway molecules, which enter the egg and convey information about the father’s fitness, such as diet, exercise habits and stress levels, to his offspring. These non-DNA transfers may influence genomic activity that boots up during and after fertilization, exerting some control over the embryo’s development and influencing the adult they will become.

The Foundry.

The American experiment has not failed. It was hijacked by the progressive movement more than a century ago.

Over the past 100 years, the federal government has usurped roles never intended for it: family formation, moral instruction, income distribution, education, overregulation, even meaning itself, aided and abetted by the media/entertainment/advertising-industrial complex.

As the state grew more behemoth, church and community institutions were hollowed out; which was the cause and which the effect may be arguable, but the correlation is indisputable.

The “little platoons” that once formed Americans into responsible citizens have been crowded out by self-perpetuating bureaucracies fueled by massive, unsustainable debt.

The challenge of our time is to return the government to its constitutional limits, enabling families, churches, and community organizations to once again fulfill their historical responsibilities.

Read it.

This isn’t my first long road trip in an EV, but some of the challenges I had in that first trip happened here. About half of the Electrify America stops had at least one broken charger. Few of the chargers delivered close to the 200kW max recharge rate of the Buzz, but that was probably due to VW’s battery limits in winter conditions.

One key difference between my 2022 trip and this 2025 trip is that thankfully almost every charger had a card reader on it so I could tap to pay and charge instantly. Back in 2022, I was forced to use an app for every charger network that required you to have an account attached to a credit card and that sometimes took 10 minutes to set up at each new charger I hadn’t been to before.

Twice on this trip, I got to a charging station only to find it was full and had a line of people waiting to charge, so I had to look elsewhere. My biggest blunder was seeing a fast Rivian charger in a tiny town in the middle of nowhere, Price, Utah on Apple Maps. When I drove up to the location, I found out it wasn’t done being built yet. So I had to use a slower 75kW ChargePoint station that took almost an hour to charge the battery back up because I was on my last 20 miles of range. Oops.

Rory Sutherland (whom I respect a great deal) is of opinion that anyone who drives an electric car won’t return to a gas-powered car, and that ‘range anxiety’ with respect to electric cars is overblown. I have my doubts about both of those positions. My wife and I drive hybrids, and I doubt that I would be happy falling back to a gas-powered car, but the advantage of a hybrid over an all-electric car is that you take your charger with you.

The Times (UK).

More than one thousand pubs are thought to have barred Labour politicians in a protest over higher business rates, campaigners have said.

Rachel Reeves’s local pub in her Leeds West & Pudsey constituency, the Marsh Inn, became the latest to join the ranks of the No Labour MPs protest this weekend.

UK Hospitality has warned that business rates for the average pub will increase 76 per cent after the chancellor’s changes, which could lead to some closures.

Can you imagine any American bar refusing service to Democrat members of Congress because they increased business taxes?

Read it.

But the AARP, the FBI, and your friendly local payments nerd will all tell you that if you’re abused on your debit card you are quite likely to be made whole, and if you’re abused via purchasing gift cards, it is unlikely any deep pockets will cover for you. The difference in treatment is partially regulatory carveouts, partially organized political pressure, and partly a side effect of an accountability sink specific to the industrial organization of gift cards.

Read it.

One of my favorite definitions of a problem comes from the late Gerald Weinberg

A problem is the difference between things as perceived and desired.

This definition is great because it’s actionable. It tells you that there are three ways to approach a problem:

1. Move the world towards the desired state
2. Change your perception of the current state
3. Change your desired state

Points two and three seem like cop-outs at first — you basically avoid solving the problem. But they often turn out to be not just viable but optimal since they force you to re-frame and re-contextualize the problem.

Read it.

Because we all want to do that, right?

There’s a growing list of public and private companies that are working to build reactors for various purposes. These reactors vary widely in their design, size, output, and potential purpose. Everything is on the table: from using the same designs we’ve used for decades to novel ideas still only on the drawing board.

This article is designed to serve as a point of reference when reading about a new company and the reactor they’re designing. Some of the features companies discuss are less novel than they sound, and vice versa. Hopefully, the information provided here can provide a more clear picture for the investor to make an informed decision.

Read it.

A recent article lays out the collapse of the dominant geopolitical model of “rising powers generate conflict”: The Stagnant Order And the End of Rising Powers (Foreign Affairs, paywalled). The basic idea is that the foundations of “rising powers”–demographics and productivity gains–no longer support grandiose planetary dominance.

Rather, demographics is already baked in as a crushing liability to all existing powers, and despite endless claims that technology will jumpstart productivity, the reality is productivity gains have flatlined for decades. “Growth” is a function of expanding debt, not productivity gains.

This dynamic extends beyond geopolitical models: all the models being used to explain and control the world are all collapsing: economic, social, political, they’re all collapsing because they are all constructs assembled in eras that no longer map the present.

As I explained in The Entire Bubble Economy Is a Hallucination, models collapse because of two limitations that define all models:

Read it.

The U.S. government is encouraging white men to report instances of workplace discrimination—part of the Trump administration’s broader effort to scale back DEI initiatives across the country.

Andrea Lucas—acting chair of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC)—posted on X this week asking

“Are you a white male who’s experienced discrimination at work based on your race or sex?”

She added that those affected “may have a claim to recover money under federal civil rights laws.”

Read it.

It was less than three years ago — early 2023 — that I was writing about the then-universal government and industry line that electric vehicles (EVs) would soon be taking over the American car market. In April 2022 the Biden Administration had adopted aggressive vehicle mileage standards intended to be achievable only through rapid transition to EVs. Our “climate leader” states, California and New York, had then adopted regulations in August and September 2022, respectively, mandating a phase-out of sales of combustion vehicles, to culminate in 2035, after which only EVs would be allowed. In a post in January 2023, I linked to the websites of Ford and GM, where they both touted their grand plans for rapid conversion of their companies to the manufacture of mostly or entirely EVs. At that time, Ford was claiming that it would “lead America’s shift to EVs,” and would achieve 50% of its sales in that category by 2030. GM bragged about its “path to an all-electric future” by 2035.

Curtis Yarvin: “The test of any legacy system is always whether, if it did not exist, anyone would invent it.”

Read it.

Curtis Yarvin is an American political thinker, essayist, and software engineer known for his concept of the ‘Cathedral,’ his description of the modern West’s informal nexus of media, academia, and bureaucracy. Writing under the name Mencius Moldbug in the 2000s, he became one of the formative voices of the neoreactionary or postliberal movement. Combining historical erudition with irony and intellectual independence, Yarvin argues that Western democracy has ossified into a managerial order and that genuine renewal requires a return to first principles of authority and legitimacy.

Here is the dirty secret of campus race politics: it isn’t actually about race. No one cares about ‘black conservatives.’ There is nothing ‘historic’ about Clarence Thomas or Condoleezza Rice.

The point of ‘affirmative action’ is that it oversamples ideology. Race communism (communism, but with the workers and peasants replaced by people of color) is the central ideology of the Cathedral, and always has been. The word ‘progressive’ has been used in the same way for a century, from the Old Left to the New Left. Say ‘racial progressivism,’ and a progressive might even agree.

The real purpose of the admissions officers is to maintain ideological and political hegemony. This is hardly hard—most peoples’ instinct is normally to support the powers that be. But it’s always best to keep power in shape.

Without the ability to stack the political deck by using race as a proxy, the commissars will just have to select even harder for more hardcore communism itself. Here we see, for instance, sexual minorities taking the front seat over racial minorities.

Read it.

I thought Global Warming We’re All Gonna Die had gotten rid of all the Arctic ice.

hoe_math: “Universal Basic Income is like leaving food out around your house. It eventually attracts vermin. It is bad social hygiene.”

Read it.

During an October swing through Southeast Asia, US President Donald Trump struck same-day agreements with Malaysia and Thailand to deepen cooperation on critical minerals and rare earths, underscoring Washington’s push to diversify supply chains away from China, according to SCMP.

According to the White House, Trump and Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim agreed to expand collaboration on building and securing critical mineral and rare earth supply chains. Using similar language, Washington said it would also “strengthen cooperation [with Thailand] on critical minerals supply chains development and expansion,” including exploration, extraction and processing.

The back-to-back deals reflect how resource-rich economies have become central battlegrounds in the US-China rivalry over rare earths. Analysts say Beijing currently holds the advantage, having spent decades engaging countries across Southeast Asia, Africa and Latin America. These nations often view China as a “partner that actually builds,” with investment that comes with fewer political conditions than US funding.

Victor Davis Hanson.

Recently, the Trump administration, as most administrations do at the beginning of their four-year term, issued a National Security Strategy—I guess we would call it a white paper—outlining the approach of the administration to foreign affairs and the protection of the security in the United States.

It’s written in a different style than past reports, different than the first term. And it has a lot of emphasis, as most do, on sections of the world. But what has caused the most controversy are two things.

Abroad, the report tells Europe that it’s experiencing “civilizational erasure,” and gives advice to the Europeans about what they must do to correct that, but in a manner of brotherly love or help, which the Europeans, of course, will see as condescending and interference into their internal affairs, except they want us to do it in the NATO part of the equation, but not the EU part. And that’s caused a lot of controversy.

Rory Sutherland:

The Democrats fundamentally, I think, are in this bizarre hall of mirrors where effectively their own opinions and thoughts have now become subordinated to a kind of  artificial world-view where you have to buy the entire album, as it were—there’s a Times journalist who talks about this, which is sort of ‘album politics’—in other words, it’s not just that you have left-wing politics, you have to buy into every single opinions that is believed to be from the Left, and you have to buy the whole package deal. And consequently you wind up with this very, very strange group of people thinking they’re normal.

Watch it.

Sometimes the old ways are best.

Texas ought to cut back on cattle and start raising more bison.

The Times (UK).

Written examinations with a pen and paper “remain the purest test we have”, according to the head of the exams regulator Ofqual.

Sir Ian Bauckham said: “Pen and paper will always matter in the classroom and in exams. The written examination, sitting in an exam hall with a pen and paper, remains the purest test we have of a student’s command of their subject.”

He was speaking after Ofqual began a consultation into more typed assessments for GCSEs and A-levels on Thursday.

Sometimes the old ways are best.

Victor Davis Hanson.

Each administration, at some point in its first or second year, has a strategic assessment, a strategic strategy of what the United States’ economic, diplomatic, political, and military objectives will be in foreign affairs.

Ours just came out. And one of the more controversial sections—which I think, otherwise, was a pretty sound strategy—was simply saying that our partners, the founders of Western civilization, the Europeans, are in dire trouble. And then the authors of the strategic assessment said they face “civilizational erasure.”

Well, you can see what that did to the Europeans. Nothing is more humiliating or makes the Europeans angrier than we upstart Americans—who our founders came from Europe and many of us did as well—to be lecturing the Europeans on what they’re doing wrong.

So, they’re very angry at us. But why are they angry at us? Because the assessment outlined why Europe’s in trouble. Its radical green proposals, their New Green Deal version is much more deleterious than ours. They have ample amounts of gas in the North Sea and oil. They have gas, natural gas, in France and other places. And yet, they’re hell-bent—if I could use that term—on wind and solar that’s costly and unreliable.

Financial Times, a Voice of the Crust.

(The Financial Times is the British analog of the Wall Street Journal—if the Wall Street Journal were run by the staff of Mother Jones.)

It is early October and Srinivasan is hosting what he’s called the Network State Conference, an event targeting “those interested in founding, funding and finding new communities”.

For years, the entrepreneur has preached to clubby tech gatherings that they should gather their online comrades and set up a physical homeland — a network state, be that a city or a country — by joining together to buy land. He has hailed this as the “ultimate exit” by Silicon Valley from “failing” US institutions and democracy.

But what was a fringe concept a matter of years ago is now attracting more interest as scrappy start-up chief executives and aggrieved billionaires contemplate the allure of tech-friendly havens unbound by legacy rules and regulation. While some are aspirational, reliant on their founders securing hard-to-come-by special economic zone status, there are now about 120 “start-up societies” in the works, according to an open-source database shared by Srinivasan. A few have received hundreds of millions of dollars in venture capital from funds backed by the likes of investors Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen, OpenAI founder Sam Altman and Brian Armstrong, Coinbase chief executive.

The basic problem is that there is no space on earth left that is not subject to an existing government, and governments are run by politicians, and politicians live to meddle. There is no escaping that fatal fact. The best you can do is pick a country that is less bad than the alternatives. Nomad Capitalist has an entire business model based on this painful truth.

Read it.

When Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman announced The Line on January 10, 2021, he promised a radical reimagining of urban life. “We need to transform the concept of a conventional city into that of a futuristic one.”

Tucked into the upper corner of the kingdom’s Tabuk province, the city would run like a ruler through the Neom region, housing nine million people, the population of Austria, within just 34 square kilometers, all powered by renewable energy. It imagines a world where every need sits within a five-minute walk, yet one can cross the entire city in twenty minutes. But even in a country wealthy enough to seed rain clouds and bankroll vast infrastructure, reality is colliding with ambition. The city that promised to “deliver new wonders for the world” is struggling to deliver its own foundation.

By 2030, only 2.4 kilometers of the 170-kilometer project will be completed, with the rest delayed as the government prioritizes energy infrastructure and scrambles for funding. The project’s leadership has been reshuffled, with the head of the sovereign wealth fund, The Public Investment Fund, now steering the effort amid deepening financial uncertainty. This is unsurprising. The Line was imagined as an engineering object, an architectural marvel, rather than a city that must grow from real human demand. The economic foundation beneath that vision is equally unstable. Saudi Arabia’s fiscal fortunes depend on oil, a commodity that swung from over $110 a barrel in 2012 to $42 in 2020 and now hovers near $70. The financial bedrock for this trillion-dollar city is, like the desert beneath it, shifting.

The Guardian, a Voice of the Crust.

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

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

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

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

Watch it.

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

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

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

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

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

I second that emotion.

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

Navy Matters.

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

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

Read it.

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

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

The War Zone.

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

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

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

I find this very disquieting.

Read it.

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

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

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

Watch it.

Nothing is sacred.

I’ve got an MBA. He’s not wrong.

Back later.

Watch it.

Great weapons that no one will see coming.

Read it.

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

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