The Hill, a Voice of the Crust.

Is there anything more dangerous to America than political extremism? The answer is yes — and that would be extremism disguised as moderation.

Every commonsense Democrat knows that socialism and antisemitism have no place in the party — not if they want it to win, let alone serve the public interest. Why, then, are some moderates focused less on rejecting these ideas than on finding ways to camouflage them?

I am truly astonished that The Hill allowed this to be published.

Watch it.

Amy Dangerfield is a commentator well worth following.

Australia was a great disappointment during the Pandemic Panic. They always seemed like Americans under the skin, but COVID revealed in them a totalitarian streak that was very disturbing. But as with the UK, the worm appears to have turned.

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Chimpanzees, along with bonobos, are humans’ closest living relatives. In fact, you may have heard that humans and chimps share 98.8% of their DNA.

But is this actually true? And what does “similar DNA” actually mean?

The truth is that the frequently cited 98.8% similarity between chimp (Pan troglodytes) and human (Homo sapiens) DNA overlooks key differences in the species’ genomes, experts told Live Science.

Read it.

“They give you a chance to leave. If you don’t leave, they give you another chance. If you don’t leave again, they just run your name.”

He said if the information shows there is an outstanding warrant, handcuffs come out.

Matthew, who did not want to share his last name, said police have been more visible in a neighborhood that has struggled with crime, homelessness, and drug use for a long time.

The display of force by law enforcement is anything but accidental.

Read it.

Live by the study, die by the study.

The New Neo.

Just today I discovered this essay written in December of 2023 by Benjamin Kerstein. It’s entitled “The rise of barbaric progressivism,” and subtitled “Antisemitism, racial hierarchy, violence, and an alliance with radical Islam have seized the commanding heights of the movement.” The phenomenon has only become clearer and more intense since then, but it was already apparent. What sounds as though it might be an oxymoron – “progressivism” allied with “barbarism” – is nothing of the sort. Instead, it is perhaps inevitable, a built-in feature of the former.

No, I have no idea what the slice of blueberry pie is doing there.

Dom Corriveau.

Do you want to sign up for text alerts? No, I want to be left alone.

Do you want to get a phone call reminder before your appointment? No, I want to be left alone.

Do you need help with self-checkout? No, I want to be left alone.

Do you want to sign up for our rewards program? No, I want to be left alone.

Do you want to provide your email address to read the rest of the article? No, I want to be left alone.

Do you want to turn on notifications? No, I want to be left alone.

Do you want to see what I’m selling door-to-door? No, I want to be left alone.

Do you want to use our A.I. text prediction? No, I want to be left alone.

Do you want to go to our seminar? No, I want to be left alone.

Do you want to set up a meeting with one of our sales ninjas? No, I want to be left alone.

Do you want to scan a QR code? No, I want to be left alone.

Do you agree to our terms? No, I want to be left alone.

Read it.

A new report covered by the BBC projects Scotland’s wild boar population will rise by over 60% in fifty years, from a precise 1,472 to about 2,400. This startlingly specific number—1,472—raises an obvious question: how can anyone count these elusive, nocturnal animals so exactly?

The answer is that it’s not a direct headcount. The figure is a scientific estimate derived from a population model. Researchers combine data from field surveys—tracking signs like rooting damage, droppings, and tracks—with footage from camera traps and information from organised culls. This data helps scientists build a robust statistical picture of the population, with the precise number representing the most likely estimate within a probable range.

This modelling is essential because wild boar are famously secretive, spending their days hidden in dense forestry. Without these methods, gauging their numbers would be pure guesswork.

The report’s projection also hints at a deeper story. Given that a sow can produce two litters of up to ten piglets annually, a rise of only 1,000 animals over 50 years seems surprisingly low. This modest increase suggests that significant population control is already a key factor in the forecast. The model anticipates that current management efforts will continue to temper the boar’s explosive reproductive potential.

This is where organisations like the British Association for Shooting and Conservation (BASC) play a vital role. They argue that supported, active management is crucial to keeping populations stable and mitigating damage to agriculture and the landscape. They promote the humane culling of boar and offer Wild Boar Certificate courses to train hunters in safe, ethical, and effective practices, ensuring culling is conducted responsibly.

Furthermore, BASC advocates for greater promotion of wild boar meat as a nutritious, sustainable byproduct of this necessary management, creating a incentive for keeping numbers in check.

The core takeaway is that the number 1,472 is less about a perfect count and more about establishing a baseline for a necessary conversation. The real focus is on ensuring structured, humane management continues to balance the presence of this iconic species with the needs of the Scottish countryside.

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In a recently published essay, famed British evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins notes the parallel between today’s pseudoscience regarding gender, and 1940s-era Soviet pseudoscience regarding genetics. In our own era, activists demand that we reject scientific principles of biological sex insofar as they prevent men from announcing themselves as women. In the USSR, similarly, Joseph Stalin’s scientists were instructed to reject principles of biological inheritance that contradicted the communist dream of remaking the natural kingdom (humans included) according to Marxist-Leninist dogma.

The scale of the damage wrought by these two movements is vastly different, of course. (Stalin’s junk science—championed by a crackpot autodidact named Trofim Lysenko—resulted in disastrous agriculture policies and widespread famine that killed millions.) But the overall pattern of ideologically programmed delusion is the same: Where scientific reality and fantasy are in conflict, it is the science that must be sacrificed, not the fantasy.

In a contribution to a new collection of essays on the misuses of science, Dawkins details the fate of Soviet scientists who initially resisted Lysenko’s program. They were publicly denounced at an infamous 1948 session of the Lenin All-Union Academy of Agricultural Sciences, where Lysenko and others railed against “reactionary” (which is to say, ideologically non-compliant) theories of biology. In keeping with the strange Soviet practice of categorising dissident ideologies with lengthy hyphenations (the “Zinoviev-Kamenev deviationists,” etc.), the preferred communist slur for heretics in the field of genetics was “Mendelist-Morganist-Weissmanist” (a term referencing legendary scientists Gregor Mendel, Thomas Hunt Morgan, and August Weismann)—roughly analogous to “TERF” in the idiom of modern gender ideology.

Rory Sutherland:

One great thing about Donald Trump: He’s not a lawyer. He’s not an economist, and he’s not a lawyer. I know that sounds like fairly faint praise, but actually the extent to which the legalistic mind or the economic mind have dominated political decision-making and government policy is completely disproportionate. It’s created, as I said, you know, this kind of HR-ification of the Democratic party, where it’s all about codification and internal consistency. Now, this value of consistent theory, that’s kind of a middle-class educated shibboleth. You know, the idea that you absolutely have to be consistent. This is going back to the beginning of the conversation, you can’t be completely consistent because what is actually rational is very very context-dependent. Sometimes you should actually back down, sometimes you should be highly concilatory, sometimes you should get angry.

The Telegraph (UK).

The late Queen oversaw a change to the law of succession in 2013 that ensured the firstborn child of a monarch would be next in line to the throne regardless of gender.

However, a government source quoted on the subject in a new book has suggested that the monarch was lukewarm about making the change.

According to Power and the Palace, by Valentine Low, neither Queen Elizabeth nor her aides at Buckingham Palace showed any great eagerness when David Cameron, the then prime minister, set his sights on delivering a package of constitutional reform.

A lot of the damage done to British society has been done by nominally Conservative administrations, whom one would think would resist such changes; all to be Hip and Trendy.

The Spectator.

Here follows a non-exhaustive list of my genetic flaws. I am short-sighted, more so as I age. I have bunions, dodgy knees and even dodgier shoulders. I have asthma. My skin blisters easily. My hair started going grey when I was in my late teens. I have zero talent for foreign languages, running or music. I am prone to nightmares, as well as to depression and anxiety.

Relatively mild flaws, as they go. But still, these aren’t traits I’m eager to pass on. Our three-year-old already shows a tendency for nightmares that sometimes makes me wince with guilt. Not that it’s my fault, of course. We don’t get to choose which of our genes we pass on. Every conception is a roll of the dice.

But soon that will no longer be true. In fact, it’s already not quite true, at least for those who have the means and determination to load the dice. Emerging technology is about to present parents with a set of ethical questions that make the usual kinds of debates – breast milk or formula? Nanny or daycare? – seem trivial. We have always had the power (more or less) to control our children’s nurture. Before long – perhaps in just a few years – any parent who can afford to will have control over the minutest details of a child’s nature too.

The reason eugenics is trash-talked by the Usual Suspects is that they are an infernal intersection between those who believe that eugenics inevitably means “government mass murder of the alleged inferior” and those who believe that We Are All Equally Good In Every Respect If We Just Wish It So and are congenitally opposed to anything that suggests something different.

As we grow more and more knowledgeable about our genetic code, we will become more and more able to fix the things that we consider to be wrong, ranging from the obvious (like a tendency to come down with a debilitating condition) to the less obvious (want you kids to have blonde hair and blue eye? Not a problem!)

The crucial change set to turn our lives upside-down is called ‘preimplantation genetic testing for polygenic disorders’ (PGT-P), hereafter ‘polygenic screening’. Testing a foetus or embryo for some conditions is now a routine part of the modern pregnancy experience. Prenatal Down’s Syndrome tests, for instance, are so widespread that in some Scandinavian countries almost 100 per cent of women choose to abort a foetus diagnosed with the condition, or – if using IVF – not implant the affected embryo. The result is a visible change to these populations: there are simply no more people with Down’s to be seen on the streets of Iceland and Denmark.

I’m sure somewhere there are hand-wringers who think that’s a bad thing, even among those who do not flinch at aborting a fetus or an embryo.

New Atlas.

Plant-based microbeads made from everyday ingredients like green tea and seaweed have helped mice shed weight by trapping fats in the gut, reports a new study published in Cell Biomaterials. Researchers see these microbeads as a potential “structured, drug-free therapy” to treat obesity, with fewer side effects than the current medications.

Wake me up when these are available as a commercial product.

Daniel Klein & Zachary Yost.

All libertarians will agree that government exists in the United States. Thus, they will agree that governmental evil is afoot. They will also agree that that evil may be greater or lesser. Since it is fanciful to hope to eradicate governmental evil entirely, the conscience calls libertarians to mitigate governmental evil.

To do one’s part, one must formulate and assess rival evils. America has a two-party system, Democrat and Republican. That contest is not the only one; there are contests between rival evils that cut across the two parties and that divide either or both of the parties. But the choice between Democrats and Republicans remains highly salient. Given these choices, we contend that libertarians should usually favor Republicans over Democrats.

My problem with libertarians is the same as my problem with Marxists:

(1) They think that politics is downstream of economics; if you get the economics right, the politics will follow. This is horseshit. Politics is upstream of economics, as it is downstream of culture. Culture will determine your society’s politics, and politics will determine your society’s economics. Politics is about morality, and your culture’s morality will determine your attitudes toward property, profit, and taxation, not the other way around.

(2) They focus on an artificial person, who is neither a reflection of real people, nor (if it were) accounts for the whole of a population. Libertarianism is built on the assumption that everybody in the society is a rational adult, and can make rational adult choices. This is obviously absurd to anybody who spends any time out among people, much less reads the news. Marxism is built on the assumption that society consists of two mutually exclusive classes, bourgeois capitalists and proletarian workers, and the purported class struggle between them. This takes no account of the progress from manual worker to financially independent investor that millions have traveled since Marx started scribbling.

Both ideologies are a triumph of a-priori reasoning over actual experience. I have no time for either, or their proponents.

Read it.

How strong are the constraints against nuclear use? Experimental studies find that a majority or near majority of citizens in multiple major powers approve of their own governments’ nuclear strikes if they create military advantages or protect co-national soldiers. But what if the nuclear taboo only begins at the water’s edge when individuals evaluate the use of nuclear weapons by a foreign government? Many policymakers believe that the international reaction to nuclear use would be severe, especially among allies. Yet prior studies have not tested this assumption. An identity-based theory of support for nuclear weapons use proposes that this argument is incorrect. The public will display favoritism toward allied and partner countries because it views them as members of the in-group. Four survey experiments in the United States and India provide evidence for this theory. In contrast to many policymakers’ expectations, public approval of nuclear use is not significantly lower for allies or strategic partners than for one’s own government. As expected, however, approval is lower for out-groups, such as non-allied and non-partner countries. Absolute support for nuclear attacks is also high, even when it is foreign countries pushing the button. On balance, these findings are inconsistent with the existence of a nuclear taboo or strong non-use norm.

The New York Times, a Voice of the Crust.

On a wisp of land in the Indian Ocean, two hops by plane and one bumpy speedboat ride from the nearest continent, the sublime blue waves lapping at the bone-white sand are just about all that breaks the stillness of a hot, windless afternoon.

The very existence of low-slung tropical islands seems improbable, a glitch. A nearly seamless meeting of land and sea, peeking up like an illusion above the violent oceanic expanse, they are among the most marginal environments humans have ever called home.

And indeed, when the world began paying attention to global warming decades ago, these islands, which form atop coral reefs in clusters called atolls, were quickly identified as some of the first places climate change might ravage in their entirety. As the ice caps melted and the seas crept higher, these accidents of geologic history were bound to be corrected and the tiny islands returned to watery oblivion, probably in this century.

Then, not very long ago, researchers began sifting through aerial images and found something startling. They looked at a couple dozen islands first, then several hundred, and by now close to 1,000. They found that over the past few decades, the islands’ edges had wobbled this way and that, eroding here, building there. By and large, though, their area hadn’t shrunk. In some cases, it was the opposite: They grew. The seas rose, and the islands expanded with them.

Read it.

Scientists have finally uncovered direct genetic evidence of Yersinia pestis — the bacterium behind the Plague of Justinian — in a mass grave in Jerash, Jordan. This long-sought discovery resolves a centuries-old debate, confirming that the plague that devastated the Byzantine Empire truly was caused by the same pathogen behind later outbreaks like the Black Death.

This is the first recorded pandemic, the Plague of Justinian, which occurred roughtly 550-660 AD. It devastated the Eastern Roman Empire and paved the way for the subsequent Muslim conquests.

Read it.

Here’s how it usually starts. You’re standing in line for coffee and run into someone from finance. A little small talk, a joke or two, and then they mention it’s tax season. They’ve hired a student to shuffle CSV files from one server to another by hand.

You blink. By hand? Why not automate it? You recall that Michelle from development built a similar integration recently, maybe you rope in a business analyst. Very quickly, what began as a casual exchange becomes the start of a new project. And a brand-new team.

This team doesn’t exist on any org chart. It emerges organically, based on who knows whom.

And once you’ve been part of a team like that, something else happens: the next time finance hits a snag, your name will be the first one they remember.

Communication patterns don’t just influence software design; they determine how teams themselves are formed.

This has nothing to do with politics (I think) but it’s a very significant insight for anybody who works for a living.

Read it.

The End of Woke, subtitled How the Culture War Went Too Far and What to Expect from the Counter-Revolution, (Constable, 2025), Andrew Doyle’s 450-page tome with 80 pages of notes, is probably the best explanation of what woke really is—and that, despite the title, it is far from over. The book is replete with examples of the excesses of woke culture: the cancellations, character assassinations, and reputations ruined by those who think they are on the right side of history and the way to deal with opposition is to silence it.

Read it.

The long-standing “de minimis” exemption, which allowed small packages valued less than $800 to enter the U.S. duty-free, officially ended Friday. This closes the dark chapter on an era when China flooded America with cheap junk (think $10 Bluetooth wireless speakers) and, according to many in the America First movement inside the White House, helped flood the nation with fentanyl precursor chemicals – if not fentanyl itself – and fueled the drug-death crisis unlike anything this nation has ever seen. Think of it as a modern-day reverse Opium War (hybrid warfare by the CCP).

For those with a background in Latin, “de minimis” translates to “too small to matter.” But that’s certainly not the case. Since 2015, the number of packages entering the U.S. under this exemption has surged from 134 million packages per year to 1.36 billion by 2024. Much of this flood originated from Chinese e-commerce giants, including SheIn Group and Temu.

The decade-long tsunami of small packages flooding the U.S. didn’t just undercut domestic small businesses. It also created a backdoor for illegal drugs and fentanyl precursor chemicals from China to slip in undetected, fueling the drug-death crisis now killing more than 100,000 Americans every year.

Quillette.

One of the most viral memes of recent months is the image of the Andy Byron, the CEO of the company Astronomer and Kristin Cabot, the firm’s head of HR, caught on film embracing each other at a Coldplay concert. As the illicit lovers scrambled to hide themselves, the announcer remarked that they seemed like people who were having an affair. Indeed, they were. After the footage was leaked online, their lives were thrown into turmoil. That this irrelevant affair generated such a frenzy shows, as Matthew Gasda recently wrote in Unherd, that “our culture is obsessed with shame, surveillance, and control” and has a “desperate need for a new ethic of privacy.”

In her new book Strangers and Intimates, cultural historian Tiffany Jenkins provides a number of instances of people whose lives were similarly turned upside down by revelations of their private doings. She cites the example of British police officer James Watts, who in 2020 posted a series of racist memes to a WhatsApp chat group that included several of his former colleagues from his time serving as a prison guard. One meme showed an Islamic prayer mat printed with the face of George Floyd. Another featured a white dog in a Ku Klux Klan costume. Watts received a twenty-week prison sentence and a lifetime ban from holding any policing role.

What these cases have in common is the way they blur the distinction between the public and private realms. Can criminal prosecution be justified for sending messages, however odious, to specially invited members of a private chat group? Don’t we all utter things in private that we wouldn’t—and perhaps shouldn’t—utter in public? The treatment of retired police officer Julian Foulkes is another case in point. Foulkes received a visit from the police, who barged into his house and rummaged through his bookshelves searching for suspicious material after someone complained about a tweet he had posted. As someone whose personal library contains books by all sorts of figures, both Left and Right, who might be deemed extreme by some, the prospect of being shamed by the police for the books I privately read is chilling. Such encroachments on private life seem on track to become normal and thus banal. This is the urgent central message of the book Strangers and Intimates.

What is the basic difference between an authoritarian regime and a totalitarian regime? The first leaves you along as long as you follow the rules, however onerous those rules might be; the second does not, and attempts to root out ThoughtCrime. Many hand-wringers would say that this is a distinction without a difference, but it’s not; it’s the difference between Franco’s Spain and Hitler’s Germany, and that difference is highly significant. (Hitler died in a bunker, Franco died in his bed.)

Many books that deal with the topic of privacy have the disadvantage of being boring. They often read like meandering legalistic treatises on how to protect your personal information in an online age. One of the immediate strengths of Jenkins’ study is it doesn’t focus on data and digital security, but on a much broader social conception of the distinction between private life and the public sphere—and it is anything but boring.

We live in a world of exteriority–people don’t deal with the world from themselves, but rather through an artificial self or persona that represents who they would like to be or who they want others to think they are. They are always worrying about what others think, and adjust their personalities accordingly.

I’m sure you’ve met people, as I have, who upon meeting you immediately start telling you all about themselves and their life story, whether you want them to or not. I suspect that the reason for this is  that they want you to see them as the person they want you to see, which they can (to a degree) control, rather than the person they actually are (which they can’t control as much and which they may not really like). The best way to stop this process in its tracks is not to tolerate it: “Why are you telling me this?” is rude but sometimes that’s what you have to do. Such a person has no respect for their own privacy and I’m willing to bet no respect for your privacy as well.

One of the worst aspects of Wokeness is its totalitarian nature. William F. Buckley was fond of saying that a liberal is somebody who reaches into your shower to adjust the water temperature.

The American Prospect, a Voice of the Crust.

The National Labor Relations Act—that pillar of American democracy that gives workers the right to bargain collectively with their employers—was enacted 90 years ago this summer. Its constitutionality was upheld two years later by the Supreme Court, and no successful challenge to its constitutionality has been brought in the subsequent 88 years. Until last week, when the avowedly far-right Fifth Circuit decided otherwise.

To the Left, there is no right but the ‘far-right’. Savor the irony of a ‘pillar of American democracy’ that involves ‘collective’ bargaining–i.e. you have to join the collective (or at least pay them) whether you like it or not, because you are ‘enjoying’ the purported benefits that a union brings you. Even if it costs you your job because the union insists on wages+benefits that the company can’t afford to pay.

Today, the NLRA hovers somewhere between de facto and de jure nullification. It’s been slowly eroding for at least half a century, as employer resistance to it has heightened, and as the penalties to employers for violating its terms have weakened. Currently, the fact that the five-member National Labor Relations Board is down to just two members—not enough to constitute a quorum—means the Board can make no rulings. This enables employers who’ve been found to have violated workers’ rights by lower NLRB administrative courts to appeal those findings and penalties to the Board, which cannot rule on anything—essentially, giving those employers leeway to keep on doing what they’re doing, however illegal it may be.

Ponder the nature of a governmental organization that is specifically designed to favor one side of a ‘negotiation’ over another. Check out the history of the ‘Department of Labor’.

Ponder the existence of ‘administrative courts’ with no basis in the judicial provisions of the Constitution. Read Philip Hamburger’s seminal book, Is Administrative Law Unlawful?

Ponder a system in which ‘workers’ have rights but employers apparently do not. That’s ‘American democracy’ for you.

The reason America is NOT a democracy, but rather a representative republic, is precisely this sort of democratic tyranny–in Jonah Goldberg’s pithy phrase, democracy means that 51% of the population can pee in the soup of the other 49%, and there is no recourse. This is not a new thing; Thucydides is full of instances where democratic Athens indulges in atrocities and pursues policies that can change from day to day because of the whims of their ‘democratic’ government.

Read it.

The GOP announced the plan Wednesday as its response to Democrats’ congressional redistricting efforts.

“I want to take a step back from all of the chaos we had and talk about the forgotten people of California,” Assembly Minority Leader James Gallagher said, presenting a map during a news conference in Sacramento.

Gallagher and his co-authors are proposing Assembly Joint Resolution 23, also known as “The Two State Solution.” It would allow the creation of the state under Article, Section 3, of the U.S. Constitution and would require approval by the state Assembly and Senate as well as Congress. Democrats hold supermajorities in both houses of the Legislature, meaning Republicans would have to sway a number of Democrats to back it.

As I wrote earlier, this will never happen. (1) No state will give up any of its territory unless (like Virginia) it is engaged in a civil war and loses; (2) California Democrats wouldn’t split the state east-west, because it would allow Republicans some power in the state, and they will resist that to the death.

I have no idea what these people are attempting to accomplsh, unless it’s just making a lot of noise because that’s all they can do.

Bloomberg, a Voice of the Crust.

(a) This will never happen, certainly not at the instigation of a Republican.

(b) If California does split, it will be east to west, not north to south; Democrats aren’t going to do anything that will give non-proglodytes ANY increase in political power. A North California around San Francisco and a South California around Los Angeles will merely give Democrats two more Senators to beat Republicans with.

Read it.

Time to Pick a Nit: Such people are not ‘tradesmen’ unless they own a firm.

‘Tradesmen’ are people engaged in ‘trade’, i.e. trading goods for money.

People who trade services for money are ‘mechanics’ (or, I suppose nowadays, ‘technicians’). You can look it up (if you can find a dictionary that doesn’t just follow what people do as opposed to what they ought to do).

I believe that this is the fundamental premise of the book The Millionaire Next Door, which came out in 1996. So it’s been a long time coming, but it’s still good to see that the trend is continuing.

One hopes that eventually young people will realize this, get back into vocational training, and we can all watch colleges shrink back to where they ought to be.

Read it.

new study has re-examined the famous “Wow!” signal, finding that it likely has an extraterrestrial origin after all, and may have been even more intense than previously believed.

On August 15, 1977, at the Big Ear radio telescope observatory at Ohio State University, a narrowband radio signal was received. A few days later, astronomer Jerry Ehman reviewed the data and noticed the signal sequence, which lasted for a full 72 seconds. In the margin next to the printout, he simply wrote “Wow!”, and thus the puzzling signal had a name that would stick for the next 43 years at least.

The signal has, so far, defied explanation, and that’s not for a lack of trying. Researchers argued the case for it being a comet passing through the area Big Ear was listening to, only for that to be completely refuted about two days later by the team that detected the Wow! signal in the first place, as a comet would have produced a diffuse signal given the large area they cover, rather than the abruptly cut-off signal that was received.

The signal has been a source of speculation in the “aliens are out there” community, and not without reason. No other signal like it has been detected before or since. It was in a range of frequencies close to the hydrogen line, which is relatively free from background noise, making it a good range to pick were we to try and communicate with other civilizations ourselves. On top of that, the team themselves believed it to be a good candidate for extraterrestrial life.

The Guardian, a Voice of the Crust.

Japan has opened its first osmotic power plant, in the south-western city of Fukuoka.

Only the second power plant of its type in the world, it is expected to generate about 880,000 kilowatt hours of electricity each year – enough to help power a desalination plant that supplies fresh water to the city and neighbouring areas.

That’s the equivalent of powering about 220 Japanese households, according to Dr Ali Altaee from the University of Technology Sydney (UTS), who specialises in the development of alternative water sources.

While it is still an emerging technology being used only on a modest scale as yet, it does have an advantage over some other renewable energies in that it is available around the clock, regardless of the wind or weather or other conditions.

It relies simply on the mixing of fresh and salt water, so the energy flow can continue day and night, providing a steady source of electricity.

Quillette.

Civilisations seldom collapse because of a single drought, battle, or angry god. Such events dominate chronicles because they are spectacular, but they are more symptom than cause. What usually undoes a complex society is the loss of surplus energy—the margin that makes coordination across distance possible and that keeps interdependent parts working in sequence. When that margin narrows, systems fray first at the edges and then at the centre, until the framework that once held them together can no longer carry the weight of its own complexity.

The decline usually begins with smaller problems in daily life: first, deliveries arrive late; then they stop; then workshops fall idle for lack of fuel. In tightly coupled economies built on just-in-time logistics, one interruption can bring transport to a standstill and darken cities. The crisis is not only material—it touches institutions like law and bureaucracy, which also rely on steady flows of energy to function.

The Bronze Age Collapse, which occurred around 1200 BC, involved not only the fall of cities but the unravelling of an entire way of life, as palaces burned, trade networks across the Aegean and Near East dissolved, and populations fragmented into modest rural settlements. For centuries afterwards, much of the Eastern Mediterranean retained only a much smaller repertoire of skills and a more rudimentary set of institutions, which is why archaeologists have traditionally described the period as a “dark age.”

Watch it.

Explains a lot.

Politico, a Voice of the Crust.

Embattled incumbent John Cornyn is gaining steam in the Texas Senate primary, and an internal memo obtained by POLITICO shows Republican leaders want donors to pump money into the race to help the incumbent Senator edge out his rival, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton.

The Senate Leadership Fund, a top Senate GOP super PAC that drew up the document dated Aug. 26, concedes Cornyn “continues to be a weak candidate who puts the Senate seat at risk in a general election,” but it also said he has considerably closed the gap with Paxton. Previous polling showed him down by an average of about 17 points in public polling.

Polls conducted by Texas Southern University, Emerson College and Echelon Insights show Paxton now has a modest 5 to 8 percentage point advantage. SLF’s latest polling, which was conducted from Aug. 17 to 19, shows Paxton is now leading Cornyn by 8 percentage points.

Paxton comes with a lot of baggage, and people don’t so much like him as they hate the RINO that Cornyn had become. I predict that Cornyn will squeak by, now that he’s had a sufficiently thorough scare.

Read it.

The grassroots movement Operation Raise the Colors, which started in Birmingham, has since spread to Norwich, Bradford, Newcastle, Swindon, and London—among other towns and cities. The patriotic organization is encouraging people in the UK to fly their Union Jacks and St. George’s Crosses and be proud of their country as a protest against the leftist liberal agenda.

Flags have appeared on lampposts and motorway bridges and have even been painted onto roundabouts. But as quickly as the banners go up, local councils are taking them down, often citing health and safety concerns. Birmingham’s Labour-run council, for example, claimed flags fixed 25 feet in the air put “motorists and pedestrians at risk.” The same authority has allowed Palestinian flags to remain in place since October 7, 2023, and even lit the city library in Pakistani colors for Independence Day.

Tower Hamlets in East London, run by the pro-Gaza Aspire Party, has also promised to strip Union Jacks and St. George’s Crosses from council infrastructure “as soon as possible.” Officials there acted far faster to remove British flags than they did Palestinian ones.

Read it.

The cash is burning, too.

Millions of dollars raised to help victims of the 2025 California wildfires have ended up in the coffers of unrelated nonprofits pushing a variety of progressive causes, a Washington Free Beacon review found. Some of the groups that have received funds explicitly exclude white people from their services, while others advertise programs for illegal aliens.

Read it.

When the feared firestorm hit Pacific Palisades, Malibu, and Altadena in Southern California last January, the Los Angeles mayor was MIA, the “public safety” guy in charge—the vice mayor—was on home confinement for making an anti-Israel bomb threat on city hall, fire fighters were not pre-deployed, there was no water in the reservoir, and fire hydrants went dry in the Palisades.

Soon came vows by L.A. Mayor Karen Bass and elected officials in Malibu, Altadena, and the Palisades to streamline the rebuilding and permitting, which turned out to be a joke. Now, amid bad leadership, virtue signaling masquerading as help, incinerated FireAid money, and promises in name only, comes the fire sale.

In early August came word from an exclusive story in Realtor.com that foreign investors were buying up prime lots in the burned-out area of an iconic Malibu beach.

They will be disappointed when the city comes by and expropriates it to build ‘affordable housing’.

On the other hand, Democrats can always be bought, so maybe they know something we don’t.

Read it.

After decades of King Log, having King Stork is rather refreshing.

The New Neo (whose blog is highly recommended)

One of the main tasks of a blogger is deciding what topics to cover. It’s not as simple as it may seem.

Sometimes there are stories so huge they cry out for coverage, even if everyone else is writing about the same thing. Sometimes there’s just a quirky idiosyncratic topic that strikes my fancy. Sometimes I choose a story to which I think I can bring an unusual angle. Certain themes keep attracting me, although they aren’t current, such as ballet.

I’m only one person here, so I can’t do what Instapundit or RedState or other group blogs do, which is to cover all the stories or most of them, and keep churning out many posts each day. What I usually end up doing is writing about what most interests me, and what I think might interest my readers. Sometimes I guess right and sometimes I guess wrong.

I am in the same position, and follow more-or-less the same policies. I don’t break news; if the news is big enough, people will find out. I focus on things I find interesting (whether you do or not), and things that I believe my followers ought to know. That results in a pretty eclectic mix, as you may have noticed. The comment section isn’t very active, nor do I care very much that it is not; I write this stuff to get it off my chest rather than to attract ‘engagement’. My core audience are my family and friends; others a welcome to tag along for the ride.

Power Line.

Rita Panahi has a show on Sky News Australia that includes a wildly popular “Lefties Losing It” segment. I was part of that segment last night. Rita and I talked about the New York Times analysis that shows Democrats losing ground to Republicans in voter registration; whether socialism can be the salvation of the Democratic Party; redistricting and gerrymandering; President Trump’s role on the international stage; and whether peace can be achieved in Ukraine. Quotable quote: “No one wants to mess with the United States Air Force.”