Let’s see … looks like the Left Coast, the Other Left Coast, and the Marxist Midwest sweep the rankings.

Read it.

The side in control of the air tends to win. At a minimum, dominant air power is a massive force multiplier that allows the side wielding it to take significantly less casualties than its opponent. Aircraft can uniquely disrupt supply lines, command and control, and troop concentrations. The forces on the losing side must drastically alter their tactics to survive, limiting their ability to attack or defend.

Another feature is that air-to-air battles tend to be lopsided. It is more common to see 20:1 or 10:1 kill/loss ratios than even matches. For example, the F-15 has 104 kills and zero losses since entering service in 1976. The defining factors have been pilot quality, aircraft performance, weapon performance, and sensor capability (radar, airborne early warning aircraft, etc.).

US airpower was so dominant in the 20th century that most opponents focused on building ground-based anti-aircraft defenses. An arms race developed between these anti-aircraft missile batteries and ever more sophisticated aircraft, weapons, and tactics on the US side. Stealth to avoid detection, cruise missiles to avoid risking aircraft, and highly specialized tactics and weapons to defeat anti-aircraft batteries are an outgrowth of this competition.

Drones add a layer of complexity and prompt questions about how they fit into the traditional airpower paradigm.

Curtis Yarvin:

What makes history hard is that you never know where you are. History is like pitch. Even most musicians only have relative pitch, not absolute (“perfect”) pitch. They can hear the distance between notes, but not the frequency of the notes.

Imagine if the political phenomenon we call “left” versus “right” worked like this. You would have no way to sense where you are absolutely on the leftright spectrum. You would only be able to position yourself relative to the local period around you.

No need to imagine—this is indeed how it works. Moreover, humans can hear only a narrow range of the frequency spectrum. Outside 20 to 20000 hertz, there is no sound per se. There is vibration, explosion, etc. When reading the past, our normal reflex is to process events inside the local spectrum as news, and those outside the spectrum as history. This is also a subjective distinction.

The American Mind.

Just in case you were wondering, not having seen the Dirt People side in the Narrative Media.

Read it.

The Cathedral of St. John the Divine is a cathedral of the Episcopal Church, the fourth largest cathedral in the world, and unfinished. Begun in 1892, it is more exhibition hall than gathering for Christians. Given the rate of decline of the Episcopal Church, once called the Republican Party at prayer, it can safely be written that the last Episcopalian has been born in the United States.

Like other progressive denominations, the Episcopal Church, Presbyterian Church USA, United Church of Christ, and others went searching for relevance in the present age and left behind Christendom. They are now the most rapidly declining church denominations in the United States. In 1998, Episcopal Bishop John Shelby Spong wrote “Why Christianity Must Change or Die,” and every theologically progressive denomination that embraced change has begun dying. In 2000, the average national Sunday attendance of the Episcopal Church was 856,579 congregants. By 2030, attendance is projected to be 350,000.

Often attributed to historian Robert Conquest but definitely connected to Margaret Thatcher’s former speechwriter and National Review editor-at-large John O’Sullivan, Sullivan’s First Law (perhaps Conquest’s second law) states, “All organizations that are not actually right-wing will over time become left-wing.” Combine O’Sullivan’s law with Rudolf Clausius’ statement on the second law of thermodynamics: “The energy of the universe is constant. The entropy of the universe tends to a maximum,” which means the universe heads to disorder. We get a picture of institutions which, when not led by those committed to the founding orthodoxy, head slowly to disordered irrelevance. That, unfortunately, leads me to the Heritage Foundation.

And National Review, and the Kristol Krew, and….

Read it.

n Doctor Who, an alien species called the Silurians exists – technologically-advanced humanoid reptiles who lived long before humans, going into hiding and being basically undiscovered again until everyone’s favorite time-traveling alien came along in his phone box. So far, so not science. However, in 2018 two University of Cambridge scientists named their paper The Silurian hypothesis: would it be possible to detect an industrial civilization in the geological record?, after the fictional species.

Published in the Journal of Astrobiology, the paper does not argue that there was a technologically advanced species long before humanity, but proposes the interesting hypothetical question of whether it would be possible to find “geological fingerprints” of a bygone civilization that expired millions of years ago.

“One of the key questions in assessing the likelihood of finding such a civilization is an understanding of how often, given that life has arisen and that some species are intelligent, does an industrial civilization develop?” they write in the paper.

As you can see, the headline is a total lie — they explicitly did NOT claim that such a species existed, but rather asked: If it had, how would we know?

But that’s the world in which we live today; It’s All About The Clicks.

Cat Rotator’s Quarterly.

One of the legends that developed in the United States, almost as early as the first Romantics began writing about American Indians and the landscape, was that of the noble Indian living in peace and harmony with the land and with other Indians, never killing more than he could use, using every bit of all animals, and having a special knowledge of the place. By the 1960s and ‘70s, this became “Native Peoples left no footprints on Mother Earth,” meaning that they didn’t cause environmental degradation or change, and that prior to the coming of Europeans, all of North America was pristine wilderness.

To which some brave souls said, “Pick one. Was it home to Native Americans, or untouched land?” Because a few environmental historians had gone back to looking at Indians as people, people who managed their landscape and who occasionally fouled up the landscape. The earliest records about the North American landscape described fires gone wild, foul stenches that covered miles because so many bison had been run over a cliff that at best twenty percent of them could be used at all, and so the remaining hundred rotted, polluting the water and land under them.

Not a Romantic mental picture, is it?

Alma Boykin has a number of excellent fantasy series available on Amazon. Check ’em out.

ZMan’s weekly podcast. Highly recommended.

Last year I did a show on the concept of civilizationalism, but I thought it was a good idea to revisit the topic now that Trump is back in town. Many of the things Trump has been saying since the election suggest he is headed in this direction, even if he does not think much about the concept. The tides of history are dragging him along toward this new organizational model.

The short definition of civilizationalism is that instead of humanity organized into countries or empires, it will be organized by civilization. Language, culture, history, tradition, and religion are not immutable, but they are not malleable. They evolve over long periods of time, so they feel permanent to us. These are things that resist the best efforts of the ideologues.

The last time I addressed this topic it was in the historical perspective. The show this time is about the nuts and bolts of it. We are seeing the rough contours in the world and even in the behavior of Trump. His desire to annex Greenland and Canada is not much different from Russia reabsorbing Ukraine into the Russian world. Canada and Greenland are part of the American civilization.

ZMan looks behind the curtain.

Over the last week a dispute has erupted on Twitter about the relative difficulties faced by young people. One camp, current young people, claim they are entering a world that is much more difficult for them than youth of prior generations. They do not think they have the same opportunities as their parents and grandparents. Another camp thinks that young people are entering relatively good times economically but may have unrealistic expectations regarding adulthood.

To be accurate, there is at least one other camp in this debate. That camp thinks the youth face a demographic reality for which they have not been properly prepared and a prevailing culture that works to prevent that preparation. The relative state of the economy for young people does not matter if they are entering a society that is about to come apart along demographic lines. Young white people have been poorly trained up for a world that should not exist.

As is often the case, the two camps squaring off over economics are on the main stage while the camp looking at upstream issues is marginalized. While economics is downstream from demographics and culture, it still matters. We see this with the oldest demographic who remain stubbornly committed to the system. Baby boomers, overall, have it pretty good, so they still believe in the system, even it means they must endure an emergency room that looks like a Tijuana bus stop.

Even though the United States is a little further down the list, coming in 9th place, it still yields considerable power, enabling citizens to enter 186 countries without major restrictions.

Read it.

I got your climate change … right here.

Astral Codex Ten.

Asians are smartest, Africans (and other Turd World countries) are dimmest, and Europeans are in the middle. Who doesn’t know that?

Read it.

Try to get past the clickbait headline.

A woman who switched from a vegan diet to eating only meat and dairy products six years ago has revealed the shocking impact it’s had on her body.
Plant-based diets have been on the rise over recent years, with statistics from The Vegan Society and Finder estimating that between 2-3% of the UK population follow a vegan diet.
But not everybody is convinced by the growing trend to axe animal products from their diets, with one woman who has been eating only meat and diary for the past six years after previously being vegan sharing the impact it’s had on her body.

We wait with bated (not baited) breath.

The decision to follow such a drastic diet may come as a shock to most of us, seeing as we’re regularly told it’s important to practice and balanced eating habits.
However, Bella stands by her carnivore decision, claiming that her lifestyle has helped deal with skin issues, regulate her menstrual cycle and improve her mental health.
In one clip showing herself gorging on an entire roast chicken, Bella tells her 421,000 Instagram followers: “I haven’t eaten a single carb, piece of fruit or vegetable in six years and I’m not dying of low energy, nor have I wrecked my hormones.

I imagine a daily vitamin supplement would be a wise move.

“I’ve actually lost 25 pounds, now have painless periods, unbelievably stable energy and moods because my body burns fat for fuel now.”
In another clip she claims that her body odour has improved drastically since switching from being vegan to following a carnivore diet.
“People think that if you only eat meat you will smell terrible,” she says in a voiceover, while eating a steak.
“I used to be vegan for about six years [and] my body odour, farts and sweating just went out of control and now that I’m carnivore I don’t need any soap or body wash. I smell amazing and I no longer fart.”

Of course, some of that could be genetic.

According to guidance from the NHS, a healthy and balanced adult diet should consist of at least five portions of fruit and vegetables, high fibre foods such as potatoes, rice or bread, dairy (or dairy alternatives), a source of protein and unsaturated oils.
When it comes to eating red or processed meats the NHS recommends that to avoid eating no more than 70g of either per day.
Meanwhile, Cancer Research UK has warned that processed and red meats are carcinogens which have been linked to an increased risk of bowel cancer.

FOLLOW THE SCIENCE … until it changes; then FOLLOW THE NEW SCIENCE.

Face it, the Government and the Crust don’t want you to be healthy if it means you get to do it without Official Guidance.

UK Daily Mail.

A former high energy Democratic fundraiser, failed congressional candidate and social media influencer is now raising money for President-elect Donald Trump’s inaugural committee.

Lindy Li made the shocking 180 after an extraordinary journey though a crazy year in Democratic politics culminating in Kamala Harris’ historic loss to Donald Trump.

‘It’s been one of the most painful and rewarding moments of my life,’ Li told DailyMail.com in an exclusive interview.

Read it.

The tale of Lloyd Peterson is almost too perfect an American parable. Born in rural Arkansas in 1912, Peterson was the grandson of pioneers who, as the tales have it, rolled into the Ozarks by wagon. He was too hardworking a fifth grader to take money from his parents, so he dug ditches, mowed lawns, milked cows, sold newspapers. He was too practical a 22-year-old to accept a professional baseball contract offered by the New York Giants, choosing instead to manage a farm store in Decatur. “Lloyd Peterson developed his business by being fair and honest,” one industry biography reports.

Soon he began to deal in chickens, which he sold to local farmers to be raised and shipped live to cities across the Midwest. By 1939, Peterson had decided to keep a flock to produce “broilers,” the term for chickens destined to become dinner.

It was the eve of a growth spurt for both the chicken industry and the chickens themselves. Technology was key. New indoor barns featured artificial light and heating, promoting faster growth. Nutritionists carefully formulated feeds. Peterson had not gone to college, but he leaned into another angle of the emerging poultry science: genetics. He kept detailed notes on his own chickens and perused scholarly studies. Eventually, he hired a team of geneticists. When he was inducted into the Arkansas Agriculture Hall of Fame, the citation noted Peterson’s breakthrough recognition that “feed efficiency” was a heritable trait. He realized that you could, in other words, breed birds across generations that got better and better at turning food into body mass. Less input, more output.

ZMan lays out some inconvenient truth.

In the fullness of time, whoever is writing the story of the American experiment will marvel over the fact that the United States never understood itself and as a result, was eventually destroyed in a struggle with itself. A land with vast resources and a capable people could never move past a central problem that stepped off the Mayflower to start the American story. That problem is how can you build a society that derives equality from inequality?

At every step in the American story, we see this conflict. One the one hand, what drives the efforts of the American people is the desire to equalize not only American society, but the society of man. On the other hand, there is the grudging acknowledgment that what lies between here and the egalitarian paradise if the impenetrable barrier called the natural inequality of man. Despite the unconquerable truth of the human condition, what drives America is the desire to overcome it.

Read it.

There’s enough heat flowing from inside the earth to meet total global energy demand twice over. But harnessing it requires drilling deep underground and transforming that heat into a usable form of energy. That’s difficult and expensive, which is why geothermal power—sometimes called the forgotten renewable—makes up only about 0.3% of electricity generation worldwide.

And that really tells you all you need to know.

Now, though, it’s getting a boost. The recently passed US infrastructure bill set aside $84 million for the Department of Energy to build four demonstration plants to test enhanced geothermal systems, an experimental form of the technology.

“Geothermal is really ready for prime time,” says Tim Latimer, founder and CEO of the EGS startup Fervo.

But not, notice, without government taxpayers paying for it.

I remember a time when everybody didn’t assume that if you couldn’t get the government to pay for something it’s just impossible.

Read it.

From America’s founding — and before — false narratives about post-racism and meritocracy have been at play in our national identity. By the early 19th century, there was a general expectation that white men should, and could successfully, strive for self-mastery and improvement: that a hard-working, right-living youth could become a prosperous self-made man. Implicit disapproval of the poor has an even longer history, rooted in debates over colonial poor laws. As a nation, we have absorbed and employed these narratives for generations.

In tracing the roots of these narratives, two caveats are in order. First, what the average person thought about individual achievement and opportunity at the beginning of the 19th century is difficult to say. What exists are the accounts of those who succeeded, those wealthy enough to have had political power and thus be included in the historical record. Second, this topic is much too broad to cover adequately here. Many have written about the nation’s evolving sense of itself in the wake of independence and during the years in which the republic solidified. I will borrow from their insights and heavily summarize the import of their work for this discussion of the origins of The Myth, as I call it in my book.

In other words, this guy wrote a book just summarizing what everybody knows about ‘meritocracy’ and bad-mouthing every phase of American history. AI could do the same with less effort and pretension.

Americans don’t like anything that can be characterized as an ‘-ocracy’. A large segment of the population doesn’t like rich people because Envy and so smears rich people as ‘oligarchs’. Another large segment of the population doesn’t like poor people because they are the generators of crime and other icky aspects of American culture, even though that’s pretty much true, but it’s outside of the Overton Window to say so and engage in the crime of Noticing. And these segments overlap more than you might expect.

And, tellingly, the People Who Matter don’t like talk about ‘meritocracy’ because the notion that some people might have a greater dollop of Merit than other people goes against the Narrative that everybody has exactly the same potential and talents and only differ in their outcomes because Oppression.

Tyler Cowen, a Real Economist.

It is commonly assumed that the U.S. “acquiring” Greenland, whatever that might mean, will result in greater U.S. control of the territory.  Along some dimensions that is likely.  But it is worth pondering the equilibrium here more seriously.

ZMan peers behind the curtain.

On Monday, Trump will be installed as president, so naturally everyone is speculating about what he will do once he gets the keys to the White House. Interestingly, much of the speculation is around the foreign policy issues he inherits. The neocons in the media are working hard to keep Ukraine in the news, so they are making claims about what Trump will and will not do with Putin. The Israel lobby wants Israel to be number one, so they are focusing on Iran.

What does not get noticed is Trump was elected on domestic issues. In the last election, Israel and Ukraine were far down the list for all voters. The number one issue was the economy. Immigration was the next big issue. The typical Trump voter looks at Ukraine as a boondoggle and Israel as an unsolvable problem. Logically, these two issues should be far down the list for Trump, but the media is focusing on them, which speaks to the power of their respective lobbies.

…

Time is the way to think about what Trump is planning for his second term. He has just one term and that means he has about eighteen months to get his domestic agenda pushed through Congress and the administrative state. Once we get to the summer of 2026 his party will be busy throwing the midterms. This means they will not pass anything the people want but instead focus on angering the base. After the election, Trump will get nothing from Congress.

This is a lesson Trump learned the hard way the first time. Once he won the election, he was swept up in a series of events that forced him to use his time in ways that had no benefit to him. He became the salesman wasting his days tending to customer service issues, rather than finding and closing new business. The number one skill for a salesman is time management. If you fail to manage your time, you fail. This is true for presidents, especially reformers like Trump.

National Bureau of Economic Research.

Is the top tail of wealth a set of fixed individuals or is there substantial turnover? We estimate upper-tail wealth dynamics during the Gilded Age and beyond, a time of rapid wealth accumulation and concentration in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Using various wealth proxies and data tracking tens of millions of individuals, we find that most extremely wealthy individuals drop out of the top tail within their lifetimes. Yet, elite wealth still matters. We find a non-linear association between grandparental wealth and being in the top 1%, such that having a rich grandparent exponentially increases the likelihood of reaching the top 1%. Still, over 90% of the grandchildren of top 1% wealth grandfathers did not achieve that level.

Emphasis added.

Real Scientists aren’t taken in by the Aggregation Fallacy.

Read it.

I am not going to bury the lead in this article: fantasy armies are simply terrible when it comes to conducting security operations. It certainly builds tension with the audience when one side is on the cusp of losing a battle, quickly followed by a moment of pure exhilaration when an ally arrives unexpectedly and saves the day, but nothing infuriates me more than when I see this happen on-screen. This is because the opposing army is apparently great at tactical operations right up until the point the script requires them to not be. Where is their reconnaissance element? Where are the pickets? Where is the lone scout who can warn their commander an enemy army is like to arrive in force within the next half hour?

According to Field Manual (FM) 3-98, Reconnaissance and Security Operations, Security Operations are to “provide early and accurate warning of enemy operations, to provide the force being protected with time and maneuver space within which to react to the enemy, and to develop the situation to allow commanders to effectively use their force;” this essentially means security operations keep a force from being surprised or they protect a force if they believe contact is likely to occur. Whether it is the fault of the tactical Commanders on screen or the military advisors off it, it is painstakingly obvious neither have ever glanced in the direction of FM 3-98. Fantasy warfare would be far more realistic, but much less exciting, if armies conducted proper security operations during an engagement.

Reconnaissance is the defining job of light cavalry, and has been since men started riding horses.

Read it.

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

Tyler Cowen, a Real Economist.

I would say we have not yet figured out what is the best U.S. policy toward Greenland, nor have we figured out best stances for either Greenland or Denmark. I am struck however by the low quality of the debate, and I mean on the anti-U.S. side most of all. This is just one clip, but I am hearing very much the same in a number of other interchanges, most of all from Europeans. There is a lot of EU pearl-clutching, and throwing around of adjectives like “colonialist” or “imperialist.” Or trying to buy Greenland is somehow analogized to Putin not trying to buy Ukraine. Or the word “offensive” is deployed as if that were an argument, or the person tries to switch the discussion into an attack on Trump and his rhetoric.

C’mon, people!

Read it.

Conservative media company The Daily Wire made headlines recently by parting ways with Brett Cooper, one of their most popular pundits, and the host of The Comments Section YouTube channel.

Brett Cooper’s sudden departure from The Daily Wire has thrown into doubt the future of several Daily Wire productions – namely, Mr. Birchum. To top it all off, Brett Cooper’s Snow White and the Evil Queen movie appears to have been canceled.

Not to be confused with Disney’s upcoming Snow White movie featuring Rachel Zegler, Snow White and the Evil Queen was set to star Brett Cooper as Snow White, and was originally planned to release in 2025 through Bentkey, The Daily Wire’s streaming app for children.

A teaser trailer using stock footage and featuring Brett Cooper dressed as Snow White was even released as an alternative to the Disney footage being released around the same time. The CEO of Daily Wire, Jeremy Boreing, claimed the reason for the movie’s existence was because Disney was promoting “all the worst excesses of the woke left.”

However, the provision for Brett Cooper to star as Snow white was written into the contract which was made void when she exited the company. The exact reasons for her departure are unclear as of now, but one thing that is certain is that there are a lot of hard feelings between Cooper and the company.

That would be a pity.

ZMan:

This coming week could be a lot of fun, as it is the runup to Trump being installed as the new ruler, so the crazies could be out in force. On the other hand, the crazies have been weirdly quiet since the elections, so maybe it is a peaceful week. It is the old line about the dog that did not bark. Everyone keeps waiting for the crazies to do their thing, but they remain quiet and no one in official media seems to be noticing the lack of noisy weirdos.

The sudden quiet tells us that much of the craziness of the last decade or so was nothing more than a fad that has now run its course. Instead of women suddenly wearing a particular type of clothing or getting their hair done a certain way, it was mostly women picking up deranged political causes. There were men involved in the madness, but it was clearly a female led thing. It was obvious if you looked carefully at the Antifa mob. The girls were in charge.

Of course, these things do not happen overnight. You could tell that the steam had run out of the various crazy causes, even though there were still plenty of crazies. This follows the pattern of women’s fashion, where a fad pops up overnight, peaks, begins to fade and then just like that, it is gone. Antifa has become the denim suit. By the end of this year, the people we call the left will deny it ever existed in the same way old people deny having worn denim suits.

Read it.

The term, ‘conspiracy theory’ became part of common parlance during the ‘Covid era,’ but although all of us know what it refers to – and who are supposed to be the ‘conspiracy theorists’ in question, namely those people who saw through the ‘pandemic’ scam and everything it entailed – the precise nature of the ‘conspiracy’ is probably less clear. When I ask individuals what they understand by it, they usually answer in more or less vague terms. So what is it?

I love the smell of conspiracy in the morning.

Watch it.

As is common in Real Life, most of what you ‘know’ ain’t so.

I second that emotion.

Read it.

Who doesn’t know that? Go to Amazon and search for Dr. David Buss.

ZMan’s weekly podcast. Highly recommended.

The great global baby bust is telling us something. One is that what we thought we understood about demographics and population is wrong. When what was predicted did not happen, instead you got the opposite, it is time to rethink everything. The other is that there is a combination of forces that have been unleashed leading to what is looking like a great pruning of the human population.

That is the show this week. Everyone has their favorite reason for the population collapse, but those answers are probably wrong for the simple reason they assume a one-to-one relationship. In reality, complex things like human reproduction have highly complex causal relationships. That means the population collapse is most certainly do to a combination of things working in concert.

Read it.

A bipartisan group of senators, led by Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.), has reintroduced legislation to make daylight saving time permanent year-round. The proposal is opposed by a coalition of sleep medicine organizations, which advocate for “locking the clock” but in standard time mode.

Sarah Hoyt.

The problem with totalitarian states is a problem of information, or lack thereof. No one wants to tell the boss that things didn’t turn out the way he planned. And there’s a hierarchy of bosses before the ultimate boss. At each level, the information is corrupted.

Suppose that you manage a factory making boots for the army. You were asked to make 4000 pairs of boots, but you only managed ten, because the leather for the boots never got to you. When the big boss asks for the boots, of course you tell him it’s on the way, the because you know the leather providers lied and said they got it to you. The guy in charge of transport, in turn, will tell his boss the trucks are fueled up and full of boots. The fact is no only doesn’t he have boots, but also no fuel and possibly no trucks.

This is why totalitarian regimes make wrong decisions and why they lose wars. Also why they’re absolutely convinced they’re the strongest, etc. until they lose.

Now I’m going to blow your mind: this is not exclusive to totalitarian states. It’s in fact endemic in any system where truth imposed from above and no redemption is possible. In fact, most centralized organizations of a certain size, with no countervailing culture.

UnHerd.

In a surreal cascade of events, the internet personality Andrew Tate has launched a political party. He has done this seemingly in response to a resurgence of interest in the scandal of Britain’s predominantly Pakistani Muslim “grooming gangs”, as these are euphemistically known; a fact made somewhat ironic because Tate himself, a self-declared Muslim convert, is alleged by Romanian authorities to have himself used the “loverboy” method to recruit young women into sexual exploitation.

I’ll spare you further analysis of his proposed programme for the “BRUV Party”, aka Britain Restoring Underlying Values, save to say that “BBC Punishment” merits an essay on its own. But his foray into politics is perhaps less a serious proposal than a symptom of the accelerating collapse of legitimacy across almost all of mainstream British institutional politics. More profoundly still, the shake-up now underway isn’t just of political parties or ideologies, but of the mechanisms themselves: a tectonic shift, in which ancient forms of power are re-emerging, and the terms of political engagement are suddenly radically up for grabs.

Mary Harrington has a great future ahead of her as a writer of science fiction.

Read it.

Following the August 2024 release of a U.S. government report linking higher levels of fluoride in drinking water to lower IQ in children, a new review conducted by the National Institutes of Health appears to confirm those findings.

Read it.

Fortunately, the existence of Barack Obama and (especially) Joe Biden will keep Jimmuh from going down in history as America’s worst President.

Read it.

The Combat Information Center (CIC) is the nerve center and tactical brain of a U.S. Navy surface combatant. These high-tech floating command centers and their watchstanders have been put to the test over the last year, unlike any other time in history, as missile and drone barrages from Houthi rebels in Yemen have plagued the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden. With this in mind, TWZ spoke with multiple surface warfare officers (SWOs) about the realities sailors face when fighting their ship from within the CIC, including what factors come into play, what mistakes can arise during tense, time sensitive engagements, and the effects of being on patrol in a free-fire zone for months on end.

Actual combat! Not just drills! What a concept! Good training, though….

Read it.

In Singapore the patient is the customer. More than that, the patient is the customer waving real cash money at the people thinking about treating them. As people like cash money, the patient gets treated in a manner that leads to the money flowing to the people doing the treatments.

Yes, it’s that foul idea of treatment not being free at the point of consumption. Except that foul idea does lead to what is seemingly desired — a joined up health care system that treats people efficiently.

In one sense the system’s not all that different to Britain’s. Nearly all of the hospitals are government owned and run. You pay a tax – akin to national insurance – for access to medical care. But the big difference is that your taxes go into your healthcare account to be spent by you. Anything you don’t spend over a lifetime gets added to your pension — an incentive to spend enough on health care to live long enough to spend the pension. As your tax pays your healthcare you are, when entering a temple of healing, a cash waving customer and therefore gain the same attention as a maitre d’ gives in an expensive restaurant. OK, perhaps less fawning than known big tippers but still.