Popular mythology to the contrary notwithstanding, ‘reform’ does not mean ‘improve’.

Nor does it mean ‘correct’ or ‘fix’ or ‘put right’.

All it means is ‘change’, and change can be bad or good.

That’s all it means.

Follow the money.

Read it.

Pretty much every day, another customer clutching an old typewriter will walk into Mike Marr’s shop in Pawtucket, Rhode Island. Marr carefully looks the machine over. Invariably, it will be a total mess. Made decades ago, the hunk of heavy metal bristling with moving parts is now laced with years of grime. The keys are too stiff. Or maybe the paper that’s supposed to glide through it keeps getting stuck.

“Do you think you can get it going again?” the customer will ask, a touch of anxiety in their voice. Marr, who has been repairing typewriters for more than 20 years, will say he’ll give it his best shot.

“When they come in and pick that typewriter up, just seeing their smile is everything to us,” he says. Even in the year 2025, a century and a half after the first commercially successful typewriter was introduced to the American public, surprising numbers of people in the US are still using these machines. And not just for fun – many of Marr’s customers are businesses. “We’re still servicing probably 20 to 25 typewriters a week,” he says. He employs three other people in his shop to keep up with the demand. “Isn’t that crazy?”

…

It’s very hard to hack a typewriter since they are not connected to the internet.

Sometimes the old ways are best.

Read it.

Found throughout the British Isles under corner shop heat lamps and behind service station windows, the jumbo breakfast roll occupies an important place in the contemporary zeitgeist, a steadfast sentinel unmoving throughout this changing world. Cheap, ultra-processed, and unhealthy, viewed by an outsider this humble food might be regarded as little more than a culinary cry for help. But that is missing the point.

Immortalised by the Irish comedian Pat Shortt in his surprisingly catchy 2006 number one hit of the same name (yes, really), the jumbo breakfast roll is defined as including two eggs, two sausages, four pieces of bacon, and one piece each of black and white pudding, squashed into a bread roll, often with sauce, butter, or both. While ingredients vary from place to place and the precise name of such provisions can differ, the sentiment of this sandwich is the same everywhere. It exists to provide answers when you do not have enough energy left to ask any questions.

When you find yourself trundling into a fuel forecourt after a four hour drive, a far-cry from the Gloucester services, you can count on one thing to be there. When you have an unexpected meeting right when you were planning to take lunch, you can’t waste time waiting for your meal to be cooked fresh. It is both nostalgic and fulfilling, reliable and constant yet easily customisable. Like a bridge over troubled water, the jumbo breakfast roll is there for you in your weakest and weariest moments.

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At their most basic, seed oils are extracted from seeds. This might seem harmless—after all, olive oil comes from olives, and coconut oil from coconuts.

But not all seed oils are the same. Some, like sesame and flaxseed oil, have been integral to traditional diets for centuries and are extracted through natural, cold-press methods that preserve their nutrients and antioxidants.

Others, however, are highly processed. Industrial seed oils—like soybean, corn, canola, sunflower, safflower, cottonseed, grapeseed, and rice bran—are mass-produced through high-heat extraction and chemical refining.

Manufacturers frequently use solvents like hexane to extract the maximum amount of oil. These oils are refined, bleached, and deodorized, earning them the label “RBD” oils. This process makes them neutral in taste and more shelf-stable, but it also removes beneficial compounds like vitamin E and antioxidants.

Many industrial seed oils were never intended for human consumption. Canola oil began as rapeseed oil, primarily used as a machine lubricant until Canadian scientists modified it in the 1970s to remove toxic compounds. The name itself—a blend of “Canada” and “oil”—was a marketing invention. “Vegetable oil” is another misleading term—it’s often a blend of industrial seed oils marketed to sound healthier than it is.

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You’re cutting yourself a single slice of cake. You grab a butter knife out of the drawer, hack off a moist wedge, and munch away to your mouth’s delight. The next day, you’re cutting forty slices of cake for the whole office. You grab a large chef’s knife, warm it with hot water, and cube out the sheet cake without causing too much trauma to the icing. Next week, you’re starting at your cousin’s bakery. You’re supposed to cut a few thousand slices of cake, week in, week out. You suspect your haggardly knifework won’t do.

In the home kitchen, any old knife will do the job when it comes to slicing cakes, pies, and pastries. When it comes to commercial kitchens, though, presentation is everything and perfection is the bare minimum. Thankfully, there’s a better grade of cutting tool out there—and it’s more high tech than you might think.

Read it.

In a startling exposé, Lachlan Phillips, a former member of Extinction Rebellion (XR), has lifted the lid on what he claims are the true motives behind the climate activist group. Phillips, who spent several years with the organisation and produced over 60 videos for their campaigns, has revealed that XR’s agenda is not about saving the planet but about controlling the population and inciting a Communist revolution.

Read it.

Even the most opinionated become circumspect when the discussion turns to The Addiction Economy, for the term The Addiction Economy calls things by their real name, which disrupts our protective shield of denial.

Yes, denial, for ours is an Economy of Denial, where the surface stability of normalcy demands we avoid calling things by their real name at all costs, for that lays bare the core mechanisms of the Economy of Denial: addiction, extortion, deception. This is a jarring, disturbing mirror, for we see our own reflection.

We become quiet when The Addiction Economy comes up, for the core concept here is that highly profitable addictions have been normalized to the degree that the majority of the populace is addicted but doesn’t identify their addiction as an addiction because the words addiction and extortion have such negative connotations that they threaten both our sense of normalcy (i.e. belonging to the safe, stable, acceptable majority) and our self-pride that we’re far above the poor lost souls who succumb to addiction.

We have the technology.

Read it.

The degree to which Musk derangement has taken hold among Democrats is fascinating. It wasn’t too long ago that Barack Obama was regularly praising Tesla for saving the environment and creating American jobs. Maybe all the hysterical shrieking about climate change wasn’t entirely genuine. Sen. Mark Kelly (D., Ariz.) recently ditched his clean-driving Tesla because it was “built and designed by an a–hole.” He traded it in for a Chevy Tahoe SUV that gets about 15 miles per gallon. Lincoln Project cofounder Rick Wilson was temporarily banned from X, which Musk also owns, for encouraging deranged leftists to “attack” and “kill” Tesla, which he breathlessly described as “a bank for fascists, a goose-stepping hedge fund bankrolling the political fever dreams of Elon Musk and his DOGE dreams of controlling the ruins of the American government.” The Lincoln Project sent out a fundraising appeal minutes later

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The drones these shotguns are being used to defend against are most often cheap and fragile. Sure, even cheap quadcopter-style drones are faster than a foot soldier and faster than most military ground vehicles, but at 30 to 46 mph they fly at the same speed, or slower than many game birds. A good example of a widely used commercial drone that is regularly weaponized is the $3,000 DJI Mavic 3. It weighs just under two pounds and has a no-load (no weapon) max level flight speed of 46 mph with a max flight time of 41 minutes. That means it is slower than a duck, a pigeon, quail, pheasant, or even a turkey. And when weighed down with an explosive device it is even slower, and its endurance and range greatly reduced.

Note that these are all Turd World cities, not the Usual Suspects perennially castigated in then Narrative Media such as America, Europe, and China.

Steve Graham: “No one ever starts to worry when whites, Japanese, Koreans, and Chinese move in next door.”

The Guardian, a Voice of the Crust.

After long nights spent on problem sets, the most aimless and ambitious of us will forgo grad school and become interns and employees at the shiniest, slimiest corporations in America – big banks, the military industrial complex, big tech, big pharma – where we will solve interesting, difficult problems on cushy salaries.

Working at the “department of government efficiency” (Doge) seems to require the same skillset. Fueled by unbridled techno-optimism and edgy cultural capital, Doge seems less like a government agency and more like another one of Elon Musk’s shaky startups. While bewildered pundits including Fareed Zakaria struggle to diagnose and process the new technocracy in DC, our new Doge overlords are infinitely familiar to my classmates and me: they might as well be guys we knew from school.

This is the new generation of young technocrats who helped lift Trump into office: they are the crypto-obsessed love-children of Musk and Donald Trump, of Silicon Valley and the Heritage Foundation, of “effective altruism” and “effective accelerationism”. Meanwhile, graduates who lean left are simply out of luck: outside of academia, it can feel nearly impossible to find a progressive job in tech. Progressive Data Jobs, a major hub for jobs in this space, currently lists 96 open positions across all experience levels. By contrast, the careers portal at Goldman Sachs alone boasts 1,943 open jobs

The basic problem appears to be that proglodytes concentrate on spending other people’s money rather than on making money that can then be spent, which means that proglodyte organizations are dependent on ‘funding’ (other people giving you money for you to spend without any profitable result), which means that the jobs are always going to be more plentiful in organizations devoted to making money than organizations devoted to just spending money. Proglodytes are basically beggars (or thieves) rather than makers.

The Telegraph (UK).

Immediately followed by all the French ‘super-rich’ moving elsewhere.

Europe is desperately scrambling for ways to fund greater defence spending as Donald Trump brings the era of US military dominance on the Continent to an acrimonious end.

Estonia has stripped its pensioners of valuable tax reliefs and imposed a 2pc “defence tax” on all its citizens – but France has floated perhaps the most radical solution yet.

Finance minister, Eric Lombard, last week opened the door to taxing just the country’s super-rich to fund France’s military build-up.

France is facing a unique quandary – it plans to boost its defence budget by €3bn (£2.5bn) a year until 2030 while managing an eye-watering national debt of €3.3 trillion.

ZMan peers behind the curtain.

Prior to the start of the Ukraine war, it was assumed that the Russians, if they desired, could quickly smash the Ukrainian army. Russia is a big country with a big army and Ukraine is not as big, but few understood that it had a big army. At the start of the war, it had an army of 350,000, with a similar number in reserve. Fewer anticipated the hundreds of billions in NATO weapons and money. Everyone, including the Russians, expected a short war, but instead it is a long war.

One main reason for this is technology. The Russians badly miscalculated how the war would unfold, but they also failed to adapt to new technology, specifically the use of drones in frontline battles. Their first taste of drone warfare was the Bayraktar TB2 drones supplied by the Turks to the Ukrainians. This is a medium-altitude long-endurance vehicle that allowed the Ukrainians to precisely aim their artillery at Russian formations, as well as directly attack those formations.

The Russians have proven to be quick learners. They rushed to embrace the new technology and have now taken it in directions few anticipated. First person video drones are now the primary weapon in the Russian arsenal, used to not only attack Ukrainian men and material, but used to shape the battlefield. This new use of drones came to the fore in the Ukrainian Kursk offensive, which concluded last week with a stunning Ukrainian defeat.

Sometimes the old ways are best,

The American Mind.

The Supreme Court’s ruling in Kelo v. City of New London is undoubtedly one of its worst decisions in the past 20 years. The Court gave state and local governments the option to transfer private property from its rightful owner to another private owner, justifying this as a “public use” since it will supposedly promote “economic development.” Kelo is a classic example of activist judges rationalizing a predetermined result—in this case, overturning the Constitution’s protection of private property rights.

The Court’s decision stripped Susette Kelo and her neighbors in the historic Fort Trumbull neighborhood of their property in order to build an “urban village”—a fact Justice John Paul Stevens breezily dismisses in his opinion, which is a thoroughly unimpressive piece of legal legerdemain. Stevens failed to note that the neighborhood would be bulldozed even though he acknowledged that not only had Kelo lived in her house since 1997, and had made substantial improvements to her property, but that “Wilhelmina Dery was born in her Fort Trumbull house in 1918 and has lived there her entire life.” The continued existence of what was apparently a very stable residential area, however, could not be allowed to stand in the way of “progress.” Stevens held that the residents and their homes must be sacrificed in the interest of a supposed greater good.

The thousands of new jobs and millions of dollars in new tax revenue that were promised, however, never materialized. Instead, an extremely expensive vacant lot now sits where the neighborhood once stood. The City of New London even tried to charge the former residents for five years of back rent as punishment for having contested what was essentially nothing but municipal extortion for the benefit of Pfizer.

Quillette.

As the world transitions from a values-based international order to a transactional, multipolar framework, Western militaries outside the US are going to have to rearm rapidly following the withdrawal of US security guarantees. While the military lessons from Ukraine have been widely discussed, those from Israel’s 7 October war have largely been overlooked. The Israel Defence Forces (IDF) have faced intense scrutiny and a steep learning curve since Hamas launched its surprise attack on 7 October 2023. During the punishing months of fierce urban combat in Gaza, the IDF made significant military advancements but also encountered critical challenges.

Gaza’s densely populated neighbourhoods and Hamas’s guerrilla militias are, respectively, very different from Eastern Europe’s open plains and Russia’s armed forces. Nevertheless, Western commanders can draw a number of important lessons from the IDF’s successes and setbacks that may be useful to future operations on Europe’s eastern flank and further afield. From drone warfare and the use of armour to urban command-and-control and civilian protection, Israel’s experience in Gaza provides a sobering preview of what high-intensity urban warfare can entail, and how modern militaries must evolve to achieve decisive and ethical victories in any future conflict.

Watch it.

I love Bob Hope. Sure, it’s glib, but it’s true.

“I don’t belong to an organized political party. I’m a Democrat.” — Will Rogers

Office of the Reviser of Statutes, Minnesota Legislature.

A bill for an act relating to mental health; modifying the definition of mental illness; adding a
definition for Trump Derangement Syndrome; amending Minnesota Statutes 2024,
sections 245.462, subdivision 20, by adding a subdivision; 245I.02, subdivision
29, by adding a subdivision.

…

Sec. 2. Minnesota Statutes 2024, section 245.462, is amended by adding a subdivision to
read:
Subd. 28. Trump Derangement Syndrome. “Trump Derangement Syndrome” means
the acute onset of paranoia in otherwise normal persons that is in reaction to the policies
and presidencies of President Donald J. Trump. Symptoms may include Trump-induced
general hysteria, which produces an inability to distinguish between legitimate policy
differences and signs of psychic pathology in President Donald J. Trump’s behavior. This
may be expressed by:
(1) verbal expressions of intense hostility toward President Donald J. Trump; and
(2) overt acts of aggression and violence against anyone supporting President Donald
J. Trump or anything that symbolizes President Donald J. Trump.

I am not making this up.

Read it.

If, of course, that’s what you want to be.

Read it.

Boarding schools, offering an alternative residential arrangement to the traditional home environment, have been under-studied regarding their impacts on students’ non-cognitive development. This study presents findings derived from a quasi-experimental design where changes in local educational policy caused a transition from voluntary to compulsory boarding. Results indicate that boarding students outperform their non-boarding counterparts in both cognitive and non-cognitive outcomes, with disadvantaged students exhibiting the largest gains. We attribute these effects to increased teacher engagement in course preparation, closer teacher-student interactions, and heightened student effort toward academic pursuits. These findings underscore the potential of boarding schools as a powerful catalyst for enhancing students’ human capital.

Sometimes the old ways are best.

Read it.

The great objective of DEI was to tribalize our institutions, recruiting government and corporate employees into affinity groups based on their race, sex, sexuality and other factors, and then defining institutional goals around the ‘right’ tribal mix through selective hiring and promotions.

The complete inversion of civil rights, from race-neutral to race-conscious, also transformed the intended purpose of government and all lesser institutions, from tribal neutrality to tribal partisanship, and it was impossible to achieve this without tribalizing government.

Government and other institutions stopped being merit-based or democratic, and came to reflect the tribal coalition politics that had come to define the Democratic Party’s urban machines. Tammany Hall’s old corrupt apportionment of government offices based on political favors was smoothly supplemented with racial and ethnic coalition quotas in major cities.

‘Tribalization’ is a big step backward, civilizationally, and a major reason why African and Asian countries that had been controlled by colonial powers before independence pretty much all imploded after they were cut loose.

Read it.

So far, poetic justice seems the theme of this political year. And there’s nothing more poetically just or ironic than what the Donald Trump administration just did: Turned an app used to mass parole millions of aliens into an app to help those aliens leave the U.S.

In October 2020, U.S. Customs and Border Patrol launched the CBP One mobile application to help commercial trucking companies schedule cargo inspections at land ports of entry. Starting Jan. 20, 2021, the Biden administration deliberately opened U.S. borders and encouraged mass migration—causing a rapid increase in the number of illegal aliens encountered by CBP.

Following December 2022’s then-historic high of over 302,000 inadmissible alien nationwide encounters, the Biden administration rolled out its shell game. In January 2023, then-Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas announced that rather than illegally cross the border between ports of entry, illegal aliens should instead use the revamped CBP One app to make an appointment at a port of entry.

I’m with Rat on this one.

Read it.

If anyone in the future cares enough to write an authentic history of the 2024 presidential campaign, they might begin by noting that American politics exists downstream of American culture, which is a deep and broad river. Like any river, American culture follows a particular path, which has been reconfigured at key moments by new technologies. In turn, these technologies, which redefine both space and time—canals and lakes, the postal system, the telegraph, railroads, radio and later television, the internet, and most recently the networking of billions of people in real time on social media platforms—set the rules by which stories are communicated, audiences are configured, and individuals define themselves.

Something big changed sometime after the year 2000 in the way we communicated with each other, and the means by which we absorbed new information and formed a working picture of the world around us. What changed can be understood as the effect of the ongoing transition from the world of 20th-century media to our current digital landscape. This once-every-five-centuries revolution would have large effects, ones we have only just begun to assimilate, and which have largely rendered the assumptions and accompanying social forms of the past century obsolete, even as tens of millions of people, including many who imagine themselves to reside near the top of the country’s social and intellectual pyramids, continue to imagine themselves to be living in one version or another of the long 20th century that began with the advent of a different set of mass communications technologies, which included the telegraph, radio, and film.

The latter more often than the former, in my experience. YMMV.

Read it.

Two decades ago, CBS aired a bombshell report on the flu shot, revealing a truth that health officials didn’t want to admit. Despite flu shot uptake among seniors skyrocketing from 15% to 65%, flu deaths continued to climb.

NIH scientists were devastated. They expected the data to confirm the vaccine’s effectiveness. But instead, their own research shattered that assumption. So they assumed other factors must be “masking the true benefits of the shots.”

However, as Sharyl Attkisson reported at the time, “No matter how they crunched the numbers, they got the same disappointing result. Flu shots have not reduced deaths among the elderly.”

I don’t get flu shots because the only time I’ve ever gotten sick from something like the flu was after I got a flu shot.

Read it.

Dozens of students with Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD)—the university’s most anti-Semitic student group—and outside radicals stormed a campus building last April, hammering in glass windows, covering security cameras, dragging chairs and metal tables to barricade themselves inside, and holding one janitor captive. The extremists renamed the academic building “Hind’s Hall” and refused to leave until then-president Minouche Shafik authorized the NYPD to forcibly remove them.

Even though 22 students were arrested, the school only disciplined 4, while the other 18 remained in “good standing with the university” and were able to begin the fall semester normally. Columbia didn’t disclose how many students were disciplined Thursday.

It’s unclear if radicals who participated in the illegal campus encampments last spring were included in the sanctions. Columbia initially suspended 31 students, but those were later reversed, with three facing campus bans and a fourth placed on probation. Two weeks before the fall semester began, no expulsions had been delivered.

In other words, the response to this mob action was pitiful and grudging, and hence no deterrent to similar activities in the future. As a result, we’ll continue to see left-wing mobs roaming campuses nationwide.

Read it.

Farming arose on multiple continents among populations with radically different cultures and environments and with no means of communicating with each other – how did it crop up independently at about the same time?

The Hill, a Voice of the Crust.

A conservative commentator on Wednesday asked Irish Prime Minister Micheál Martin why he allowed American comedian Rosie O’Donnell to move to the country.

“Ireland is known for very happy, fun-loving people,” Brian Glenn, a conservative commentator for the digital media company Real America’s Voice, began a question to Martin during an Oval Office meeting with President Trump. “Why in the world would you let Rosie O’Donnell move to Ireland?”

“Thank you, I like that question,” Trump interjected as Martin nervously laughed while seated next to the president in the Oval Office. “Did you know you have Rosie O’Donnell? Do you know who she is?”

Martin did not respond before Trump added, “You’re better off not knowing.”

NPR, a Voice of the Crust at your expense.

As concerns swirl over the impacts of steep new tariffs on U.S. companies and consumers, so too does talk about how certain businesses try to avoid them.

‘Certain’ businesses? ALL businesses will try to avoid them; some more successfully than others.

President Trump’s long-threatened taxes on imports from China, Mexico and Canada took effect Tuesday, prompting retaliatory measures on American exports, roiling the stock market and fueling fears of an economic downturn.

Underscoring the fact that interference with trade is always an Unfriendly Act.

On Wednesday, Trump granted automakers a one-month reprieve from the tariffs, underscoring the unpredictability — and potential wiggle room — in his administration’s trade policy. On Thursday, he signed executive orders lifting tariffs on many Mexican and Canadian goods until April 2.

Trump is not a politician, and therefore not concerned much with ‘predictability’. He’s a businessman, and ‘wiggle room’ is what business is all about.

“I’m really interested to see how much of these threatened tariffs stick, and how many of our big industries will be able to get immediate reprieves like the auto industry has already done,” says Mary Anne Madeira, an assistant professor of international relations at Lehigh University. “And I’m hopeful that industries will get a lot of big carveouts and exemptions in a way that will really reduce the potential pain.”

Looks as if they had to reach way down the academic food chain to find somebody who would give them the credentialed comment they were looking for.

ZMan pulls back the curtain.

In the 2016 election cycle, the majority of the American people signaled that they were done with the ideological politics that had reigned since the Cold War. While Trump did not win a majority in the general election, the election as a whole, including the primaries, made clear that the public was ready to move on. The way to view the last three election cycles is as a long struggle by the public to drag the economic elites out of their isolation and back into politics.

That is what we saw in 2024 and what we are seeing now. What is happening in Washington is both revolutionary and just the start. The cutting of government payrolls is one part of a bigger change in how America operates. The United States is about to end its empire phase and return to being a big powerful country. It is a long overdue transformation that has been made possible by the economic elites realizing things had to change if they were going to remain elites.

Left out of this is what it means for Europe. The issue of Ukraine, for example, has the Europeans on the sidelines, muttering mad ideas to one another about how they will get along as American vassal states without America. They are drawing up grand schemes for re-arming Germany and developing their own nuclear arsenal, so they can pretend Brussels is an imperial hegemon and the political classes of the European states can continue as dysfunctional flunkies.

Polar Bear Science. (I am not making this up.)

New evidence indicates that Arctic areas with the thickest ice today probably melted out every year during the summer for about 1,600 years during the early Holocene (ca. 11.3-9.7k years ago), making the Arctic virtually ice-free. As I argue in my new book, this means that polar bears and other Arctic species are capable of surviving extended periods with ice-free summers: otherwise, they would not be alive today.

 

Read it.

More than a century before the Eurostar and LeShuttle, a group of engineers and statesmen dreamed (and fretted) about connecting Britain to France with an underwater tunnel. Peter Keeling drills into the history of this submarine link, and finds a still-relevant story about the cosmopolitan hopes and isolationist panic surrounding liberal internationalism.

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A huge ancient city has been found in the Amazon, hidden for thousands of years by lush vegetation.

The discovery changes what we know about the history of people living in the Amazon.

The houses and plazas in the Upano area in eastern Ecuador were connected by an astounding network of roads and canals.

The area lies in the shadow of a volcano that created rich local soils but also may have led to the destruction of the society.

Read it.

If, of course, that’s what you want to do.

One of my biggest fears is that the manufacturer of a smart home product I use will go bankrupt and disappear overnight. It’s not an unfounded fear — just last year, smart home company Insteon abruptly announced that it would shut down its servers over financial difficulties. The servers would later return from the dead, but only because some loyal users acquired the entire company to keep its products alive. This isn’t a one-off example either — Philips stopped supporting its first-gen Hue Bridge in 2020 and MyQ’s garage door openers became incompatible with the Google Assistant without warning in 2023.

Many also care about the privacy implications of having cheaply made devices connect to the internet, but that’s a relatively smaller concern for me. Nevertheless, an offline smart home setup insulates me from both potential bankruptcy and privacy invasions.

The Spectator.

The rise of digital communications has been a boon but has also opened society to grave risks through cyber war. Ukraine found this out in the first years of its war with Russia. Just as worrying has been the penetration of television, the internet and streaming radio by hacker groups, both military and criminal. Attempts to change the narrative of society and sow discord through fake news and false information, denial-of-service attacks and interference with GPS signals have all been a serious challenge in the ongoing war. Ukraine has hit back with its own hacktivist networks, even disrupting Moscow television stations, and the cyber war continues.

Last year, in the United States, the FBI revealed the existence of a massive penetration of American telecommunications networks by China, conducted by a threat group dubbed ‘Volt Typhoon’. It had taken vast amounts of data about Americans, including text messages, and perhaps inserted malware into networks. This complex cyber-attack against routers and switching networks could have been ongoing for years. More recently, the spate of sabotage against data cables on the floor of the Baltic sea, involving Russian-linked or Chinese vessels, has raised alarm about communications and internet vulnerabilities for Nato allies.

Somtimes the old ways are best.

Why everybody melts down over the prospect of ‘neo-Nazis’ but nobody seems concerned about ‘neo-Commies’?

Perhaps it’s because the Nazis went away but the Commies never did….

Read it.

Artificial intelligence has discovered ancient civilizations over 5,000 years old hidden beneath some of the world’s largest deserts, including one in the heart of the Dubai desert, without the use of a single shovel. In the Dubai desert, remains of human activity over 5,000 years old have been detected, including a buried city.

The discovery in the Dubai desert revealed ancient settlements and communication networks, indicating the presence of roads and settlements.

Advancements in remote sensing and data analysis using artificial intelligence have transformed archaeology, improving the efficiency and effectiveness of excavations. The integration of AI and Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) proved especially powerful. SAR technology provides high-resolution images of structures buried beneath the earth’s surface, capable of penetrating natural barriers such as sand, vegetation, and ice.

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On the wall of his living room in Lier, Belgium, Werner van Beethoven keeps a family tree. Thirteen generations unfurl along its branches, including one that shows his best known relative, born in 1770: Ludwig van Beethoven, who forever redefined Western music with compositions such as the Fifth Symphony, Für Elise, and others. Yet that sprig held a hereditary, and potentially scandalous, secret.

That Beethoven, Werner learned to his dismay in 2023, is biologically unrelated to Werner and his contemporary kin. This uncomfortable fact was brought to light by Maarten Larmuseau, a geneticist at KU Leuven who specializes in answering a question relatively few others have explored: How often do women have children with men they’re not partnered with?

In most societies, kinship is at least partly socially constructed, and for example can include adoption and stepfamilies. Yet questions about biological paternity have roiled families and fueled cultural anxieties for eons. Male authors have written about hidden paternity for millennia, including in Greek dramas and The Canterbury Tales; William Shakespeare and Molière wrote plays about it. Knowing a child’s biological father is also important for forensically identifying cadavers, recording accurate medical histories, and charting the manifold ways in which people structure families around the world.