Read it.

Herzens), one could closely follow the psychological turmoil raging within the soul of Lieutenant Hofmiller after he asks the host’s daughter for a dance at a social gathering, completely unaware that she is paralyzed. What follows is the lieutenant’s Walk to Canossa, a primary lesson of which is understanding the different types of pity. Through the lieutenant, Zweig demonstrates that pity can be, on the one hand, active, rational, and genuinely helpful. On the other hand, it can be weak, sentimental, and selfish: not truly concerned with saving the other person, but with quickly appeasing one’s own conscience and avoiding the discomfort of confrontation. This sort of virtue signaling, devoid of rationality, ultimately drives both the victim and the benefactor to ruin.

Our age has hardly changed, as we currently live in the cult of empathy, which relates to the second type of pity depicted by Zweig. I recall from my own experience, even during my university times, that it was repeatedly emphasized: if you are not empathetic, you cannot be a good teacher since you must put yourself in the child’s shoes. This is undeniably true but just to a rational extent. Nowadays you cannot even be a corporate executive without empathy, as its absence is said to harm workplace well-being and increase organizational turnover. In fact, even the police are now expected to be empathetic since, according to contemporary progressive narratives, a person exhibiting unlawful behavior is often merely a victim of social circumstances like ‘systemic, white supremacist oppression.’

However, this is one of the greatest fallacies of our time. Empathy is an individual, personal virtue, not a prescriptive behavioral norm—not a universal metric that dictates at all costs how you ought to be. Elevated from the micro to the macro level and made the exclusive basis of state and institutional decision-making, boundless empathy has a self-destructive effect; this is the thesis argued by Gad Saad in his latest book, Suicidal Empathy: Dying to Be Kind.

Not the Bee.

Who knew coyotes were Democrats?

“Not punishing crime is incentivizing it.” — Sarah Hoyt

Read it.

Soldiers from the 101st Airborne Division headed to duty on the U.S.-Mexico border will be among the first to live in new 3D-printed barracks unveiled this week at an Army base in Texas.

Two new 3D-printed barracks buildings at Fort Bliss, Texas, which opened on Tuesday, are built for transient soldiers who are not permanently assigned to the base, Army officials said in a release. The service signed a $62.8 million contract with construction company ICON to build 10 barracks that can hold 560 troops.

Army officials said some of the first residents will include soldiers from the 101st Airborne Division’s 1st Mobile Brigade “Bastogne” unit from Fort Campbell, Kentucky. Their deployment to the southern border was announced in June.

I have an idea—let’s 3-D-print a wall along the southern border so these guys can stay in Kentucky.

EuroNews.

A digital tool lets users explore the Roman Empire’s road network and, using historical data, estimate how long journeys between cities took 2,000 years ago.

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

Read it.

Time,” said Anthony Saldivar, his eyeglasses slipping down his broad nose, “is always the biggest enemy.” Sporting a black tie and thick suspenders, his shirtsleeves cuffed at the elbows, Saldivar was one of eight contestants stationed across four folding tables inside a cavernous glass-and-steel convention center in Chicago, all of whom were attending to the same ticking-clock task. They had three hours, split over two afternoons, to rehabilitate a decomposing human head. The heads, of course, weren’t real. They were props furnished by funerary-cosmetics supplier Post Mortem Restorative Cosmetics, a company founded by the Hollywood special-effects technician Dean Jones, who parlayed techniques honed on the sets of Blue Velvet and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine into a career in the mortuary sciences.

Read it.

It hardly seems possible nowadays, but if you give a search engine a phrase, it may well search for it. I sense this is facilitated if the phrase you provide is in a foreign language. The machinery, otherwise bent on giving you what it thinks you want rather than what you just said you want, is baffled and just obeys rather than mess with your mind. Or maybe, since what I just said I want is to get married in a mosque, it rightly decided this request was unsubstitutable. None of this Did-you-mean-in-a-bus-station tentativeness. The first hit I got was for what I asked.

I should say that I personally don’t want this, and that I was asking in Turkish, for reasons I will describe below the fold. That hit was on a website calling itself, in Turkish, Girls Are Asking. Oh, I’m also not a girl, so the search engine really was indulging me. I am guessing that in Turkey, girls are likewise indulged.

The reason I was looking up this stuff at all was, on Steve Sailer’s Substack was a revisitation of a very good idea he’d had a few years ago. Wondering if there was any way to determine what sort of architecture people really like, he came up with what I’d call an objective measure of subjectivity: note where young ladies want to get married. His point was that brides strongly and publicly prefer venues that look good. California, where Steve lives, has every example there is of building fashions, and the ones that were in force before about 1945 are definitely favored. The Substack article contains long quotes from the Washington Post about how a lot of gals are uninterested in church weddings and opting for civil ceremonies, but not the ultra-simple, in-the-JP’s-office-right-now ones. Many cities are offering more elaborate packages, ones where the couple invites a modest number of friends and family to witness the knot-tying, inside City Hall or some similarly venerable municipal or county edifice. Sounds pretty nice!

The Telegraph (UK).

Andy Burnham will argue that Sir Tony Blair’s drive to get half of school leavers to attend university has “let down” a generation of young people.

Unveiling his plan to tackle youth unemployment on Tuesday, the Prime Minister will say that under his leadership Britain will “value the hard hat every bit as much as the graduation cap”.

Mr Burnham’s intervention, a rejection of three decades of policy, comes amid a surge in spending on youth sickness benefits and concerns that students are being saddled with thousands of pounds of debt after studying poor-quality courses.

Watch it.

Objectivism is Red Pill? Who knew?

The Foundry.

One reason pharmaceuticals cost so much: The Food and Drug Administration’s approval process takes up to 12 years to bring a new drug to market. The Trump administration has launched Operation Trialblazer to shorten that timeline.

It’s one of Trump’s best healthcare proposals so far, one that reduces the government’s footprint in U.S. healthcare. It is a welcome departure from some of the Trump administration’s other prescription drug initiatives that, unfortunately, expand the role of government.

The FDA approval process is divided into three phases. Phase 1 determines if a drug can be used safely in humans and, if so, at what dosage. Completing Phase 1 takes an average of 380 days and, in some cases, can stretch?to 700 days.

Other countries are taking advantage of the FDA’s slower pace. China has reduced its Phase 1 process to 60 days while Australia’s is about 70 days. The U.S. has lost its competitive edge as a result. In 2024, the number of drug trials registered in China was over 16,600 versus 9,100 in the U.S., according to the Journal of Clinical Epidemiology—the first time China has exceeded the U.S.

Once again, government bureaucracy is the reason why we can’t have nice things.

Read it.

Centuries before semioticians decided it was exceedingly clever of them, Shakespeare’s fourteen year old protégé, Juliet, argued rather more elegantly than any academic, that the connection between a word and the physical object it represents, is arbitrary. If we all decide tomorrow that the often exquisitely scented, gracefully shaped flower that comes in an endless variety of colours is called a nose, and not a rose, it really doesn’t matter. In spite of endlessly trite and tedious efforts by academics to tell Ferdinand de Saussure what he actually meant when he claimed, The bond between the signifier and the signified is arbitrary, onomatopoeia remains the only example of a word which real people think has some kind of integral connection to the physical world they inhabit. Bees really do buzz and wind chimes really do tinkle.

The insidious spread of sociolinguistics across educational institutions, and the cultural chaos it has fuelled, is a topic I’ve frequently written about, and so I thought I’d take a leaf out of these linguistic anarchists’ textbook and ask myself a particularly current question. What words might we now use, to accurately identify our major political parties?

Because it’s quite obvious today that Blair and Campbellson’s attempt to rename the Labour Party Nu Labour has been an abject failure. All it took was Corbyn’s spectacularly brief rise and fall to demonstrate their rebranding had not even been skin deep, even as the sight of all that ugly anti-Semitism on display made decent folks’ skin crawl.

But you would have to be a linguistic eunuch not to think that calling the party Burnham has just usurped, the Labour Party, is a lexical felony worthy of a life sentence. To plunder Blair’s painfully slim legacy volume, I’d suggest we all start referring to Burnham’s bourgeois, Glastonbury tent as the Not the People’s Party, because the idea that they represent working people and not their own peculiarly idiosyncratic hang ups and interests, is risible.

Fortune, a Voice of the Crust.

For decades, the story of American higher education has been about women pulling ahead. Now a new study shows that shift is also reshaping who marries whom—and it’s women without college degrees who are paying the price.

Fortune has been chronicling how money shapes marriage since long before this study — the magazine’s Julie Connelly coined the term “trophy wife” itself in a 1989 cover story, a phrase that’s since become an inescapable shorthand across pop culture for wealth-driven pairings. Now, new research suggests the more consequential story about marriage and money is happening in the opposite direction: not among the wealthy elite, but in the widening gap between non-college women and the shrinking pool of “marriageable” men.

A National Bureau of Economic Research working paper tracked marriage patterns across U.S. birth cohorts from 1930 to 1980 and found that college-educated women have kept their marriage rates stable even as their pool of similarly educated men shrank dramatically. The ratio of college men to college women fell from 1.8 to 0.8 over that span, and there are now 1.6 million more women than men enrolled in four-year colleges nationwide, according to the study by economists Clara Chambers of Yale, Benjamin Goldman of Cornell, and Joseph Winkelmann of Harvard.

“Four-year college rates for men stagnated essentially many decades ago, whereas for women, it’s been a steady increase,” Goldman told Fortune. “That’s really been the key factor that’s led to the changing ratio over time.”

The paper, “Bachelors Without Bachelor’s: Gender Gaps in Education and Declining Marriage Rates,” complicates the mutation of the “trophy wife” era into the “power couples” era: as wealthy Americans increasingly marry within their own income and education tier. This new research shows the opposite pattern playing out further down the income ladder, where college-educated women are increasingly pairing with men who skipped college altogether.

Watch it.

What if Illinois were two states? Rep. Brad Halbrook lays it out.

Harvard Magazine.

DURING THE LAST 50,000 years, human beings have transformed from nomadic hunter-gatherers roaming savannas to a species that traveled to the moon, invented the internet, and created an artificial form of intelligence. Yet many scientists believed that, during the same time frame, human DNA hadn’t changed much. Most research during the past two decades hinted that human evolution has largely slowed or changed so subtly that existing tools couldn’t detect it; evidence seemed to suggest that civilization put humans beyond the reach of natural selection.

“It’s like we had in our heads that a few hundred thousand years ago we had reached some kind of evolutionary optimization,” says professor of genetics and human evolutionary biology David Reich.

That changed with Reich’s latest work. Using the largest collection of ancient human DNA samples ever compiled, paired with new statistical methods, Reich and his colleagues discovered that the human genome has actually evolved rapidly during the past 10,000 years. The study, published in Nature in April, showed hundreds of genetic shifts in 16,000 individuals who lived in modern-day Europe across an 18,000-year period. The longer timespan provided a baseline that allowed the researchers to see how genes evolved during the most recent 10,000 years.

Natural selection is still working; it’s just selecting for different characteristics. It’s an automatic process, like gravity.

Read it.

The Nazi salute. As soon as you look up anything at all about World War II, you’re bound to come across the so-called Nazi salute within a few minutes, or even seconds. Although today it primarily symbolizes Nazism and reverence for Hitler, the Nazis were not actually the ones who invented this salute. Its origins go back much further, as it was based on the Roman salute, which was first adopted by the Italian fascists under Mussolini. But why did the German Nazis also adopt this salute?

The Hitler salute can actually be traced back to the Roman Empire. There is even a painting of it, often considered one of the earliest depictions of the salute, which is now primarily recognized as the Hitler salute. The painting is “The Oath of the Horatii” from 1784. It illustrates a Roman legend: three brothers swear to protect Rome. And the symbolism behind this is more significant than you might think.

It was Benito Mussolini who had one key motivation: restoring the Roman Empire. Or rather, restoring the power and glory of the ancient Roman Empire. Italy was to be transformed into a dominant military power in the Mediterranean. He therefore called this sea Mare Nostrum, or “our sea.” But what does this have to do with the Hitler salute?

It was precisely this desire that prompted Mussolini to create a salute derived from the Roman salute. It became a salute with an outstretched arm, long before Hitler began to use the salute officially within the NSDAP. Mussolini and his Italian fascists began using this Roman salute around 1920 to 1922. In 1925, Mussolini also made the salute officially mandatory for civil servants in Italy.

The Guardian, the Mouth of Sauron in Britain.

These black cameras, which are hooked up to a rectangular solar panel and typically mounted on a pole, snap photos of passing vehicles and run the pictures against large databases. They have sparked nationwide backlash from pro-privacy critics, who point to public records suggesting that these devices can help law enforcement keep tabs on specific license plates and the people driving these cars. That they can sweep in so many people’s location from an innocent act in a public space – regardless of whether the target is a suspect in a crime, and without a warrant – has led to fears of mass surveillance.

Flock, based in Georgia and valued at $8.4bn, says its cameras scan license plates billions of times each month in about 6,000 communities in nearly every state in the US.

The company said in a February blogpost that its ALPRs are “not mass surveillance tools” and that it “cannot track vehicles, much less individual people”.

CNN, a Voice of the Crust.

More to the point, why would we care? Climate Change, of course!

When astrobiologist Adam Frank walked into the office of NASA scientist Gavin Schmidt, he had what he believed was the weirdest question: do aliens experience climate change? It took just moments for Schmidt to out-weird him.

Frank, a University of Rochester professor who looks for signs of life in the universe, was digging into whether advanced civilizations would inevitably trigger climate shifts, just as humans are doing now. He was looking at other planets, he told Schmidt that day back in 2017, “because, of course, we know that there have been no other civilizations on Earth.”

Schmidt immediately cut him off. “How do you know that?” he asked.

WorseOnPurpose.

Fall back on “I just like it” and you sell the knowledge short, because standing in that store I wasn’t just voicing an arbitrary preference, I was detecting something. “This is a thing of quality. It is the one I want.” Fifteen years of ownership keep proving my instinct that day right.

That gap, between knowing good on contact and being able to say what good is, is one of the oldest open problems in Western philosophy. It is also the fundamental question this newsletter is attempting to answer.

Every investigation I’ve published documents the same story: a product stripped of what made it good while everything a shopper can check stayed intact. Same logo, same spec sheet, same four and a half stars, same price or higher. What got swapped out, the steel gauge, the stitch count and the years of service life, sits in the parts you can’t check from the aisle.

That gap between what you can verify and what actually matters is the whole game, for them and for you. They use it to slowly diminish the quality of the products you once loved without tripping an alarm. You can use it to watch the theft happen.

So this essay is about what quality is and where it actually lives, which makes it the philosophical foundation under every investigation this publication will run.

University of St. Andrews.

Hey, tenure doesn’t grow on trees, you know.

New research from the University of St Andrews and Université de Neuchâtel, has uncovered the mechanism which allows sperm whales to sleep in a unique vertical position, just under the ocean surface.

I’ll bet you didn’t know that.

Check in out.

An interactive simulation.

The Register.

Dougherty County Police Department (DCPD) near Albany, Georgia, is appealing for help from the local community after someone set two Flock Safety cameras on fire.

Police initially investigated whether the automated license plate readers (ALPRs) had malfunctioned. After examining evidence from both scenes, however, officers reclassified the incidents as criminal damage to property.

In an update communicated to journalists, reported by Fox 5 Atlanta, DCPD revealed nothing about what caused the fires at the 2400 block of Radium Springs Road near the intersection of Williamsburg Drive, nor did it offer any details about potential suspects that might help generate tips.

The locations provided by police closely correspond to two reported ALPR locations mapped on the deflock.org platform, a community-driven project to map these cameras across the US.

Flock, for the uninitiated, is a tech company that makes ALPRs, as well as other security devices such as cameras, gunshot audio detectors, drones, and more.

The New Neo.

I saw this headline today, “Nearly 150,000 mail ballots rejected in California’s primary despite efforts to count every vote.”

That doesn’t tell us much. Were they ballots that should have been counted and somehow were missed? And if so, why? Or were they ballots that were not legal and uncounted for that reason? And why so many – or so few? In other words, was this just the tip of the iceberg of the number of ballots that shouldn’t have been counted in that state? Or should many of these have been counted and were they unfairly excluded?

The article doesn’t say.

Of course not. The Narrative Media are called that for a reason.

This is how the article begins:

Nearly 150,000 California voters had their mail-in ballots rejected for the state’s June primary, a spike from recent elections even as the state attempts to make voting easier with the goal of boosting participation and counting every ballot.

Let’s rewrite that a bit:

Nearly 150,000 California mail-in ballots were rejected for the state’s June primary, an increase from recent elections even as the state attempts to make voting easier with the goal of boosting Democrat votes and relaxing the rules so that every mail-in ballot is counted whether it’s valid or not..

Saying the quiet part out loud….

Read it.

The Bronze Age Mycenaeans were an ancient civilization from the Greek mainland known for their impressive architecture, rich culture, and mysterious decline. Perhaps most famously, the Mycenaeans were the lead cast in Homer’s stories of the Trojan War, The Iliad and The Odyssey. These include Agamemnon, the legendary king of Mycenae who led the Greek forces in the Trojan War; Menelaus, king of Sparta and husband of Helen, whose abduction sparked the war; and the cunning Odysseus, the king of Ithaca who had to face numerous challenges during his long voyage home after the Trojan War.

While the epic poem The Iliad is generally recognized as a work of fiction, some of Homer’s accounts are nevertheless considered historically accurate. For instance, Troy was real, with most historians agreeing that it used to be located in Hisarlik, Turkey. The Mycenaean Greeks were also real people, although the legendary characters in Homer’s works are fictitious, acting as literary devices meant to explore themes of heroism, war, and human nature.

Now, a new and exciting study suggests that some of Homer’s accounts of Mycenaean warfare, long thought to be mere artistic embellishments, are plausible and may have been historically accurate. The findings center around one of the oldest European suits of armor, a marvelous 3,500-year-old suit discovered in the village of Dendra in 1960.

ScienceAlert.

If scientists managed to overcome every other aspect of aging, humans still couldn’t live forever, the new research shows. Random DNA mutations would continue accumulating in our cells until the body could no longer function.

Simulations conducted by a team at the Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology in Russia suggest this process could impose a fundamental limit on human lifespan, with most people living no longer than about 150 to 190 years under this optimistic scenario.

That’s roughly double humans’ current longevity, of about 79 years in fortunate circumstances, but it’s still a hard limit on the human lifespan.

About what Numenoreans have. If it’s good enough for Aragorn, it’s good enough for me.

Read it.

Life has scarcely found a boundary on Earth that it can’t push. While much of life’s diversity exists in lush, bountiful habitats like tropical rainforests and coral reefs, even the most brutal corners of the planet are also occupied. The organisms that thrive in extreme environments — blistering temperatures, crushing pressures, corrosive acid — are what we call “extremophiles.”

Most of these imperiled pioneers are rugged microbes, such as bacteria or archaea. Some have evolved to live in poisonous brine that would fatally pickle nearly everything else. Some can happily grow in subzero temperatures, using special enzymes that chug along where others grind to a halt. Others can shrug off the menaces of heavy metals, ionizing radiation, or the vacuum of space and still thrive.

These organisms aren’t just curiosities. Understanding their resilient biology has many possible applications. Discovering biochemicals that function under extreme temperatures, pH levels, or pressure could be a boon for a broad array of industrial processes. The organisms may also help clean up toxic pollutants by growing, thriving, and digesting where nothing else can. Extremophiles and their enzymes are even responsible for the modern era of genetics and molecular biology.

Read it.

Joel Salatin wants to liberate Americans from over-regulation with neighbor-to-neighbor food commerce.

Salatin, who runs Polyface Farm in the hills of Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley, is pitching the concept of a “Food Emancipation Proclamation.”

I have a number of Salatin’s books. He has many original ideas about agriculture, hates factory farms, and hates government regulatory micro-management. He’s the guy who convinced me to start boying pasture-raised eggs.

Through what he envisions as a federal declaration, consenting adults would be allowed to buy and sell homemade and farmstead food directly, without the costly commercial infrastructure and cumbersome government regulation currently in place.

Salatin’s mission reflects a push among homesteaders and independent farmers to cultivate local food networks, where food is grown and raised without chemicals and consumers can gain a more transparent connection to how food is produced.

The reason such a movement is needed is the effective erasure of the Institute for Justice calls the Dormant Commerce Clause in the Constitution, whereby anything that the government wants to pull within its clutches can be done by sophistry about what is and is not ‘interstate commerce’.

Got a pond on your farm? That’s a ‘wetland’ and the government can regulate it.

Grow crops for your own use? That affects Interstate Commerce because if you didn’t grow your own food all such food these days comes across state lines, so the government can tell you what to do and how to do it. Same reasoning applies to trading food with neighboring farmers or selling it locally.

CNBC, a Voice of the Crust.

About half of Americans believe it isn’t appropriate for the U.S. government to take ownership in U.S.-based companies, CNBC’s new All-America Economic Survey found.

Gee, that doesn’t faze Bernie Sanders. He wants the government to take a half-share in all of the AI companies, and CNBC doesn’t complain about that (or, if they do, I can’t find it).  Of course, he wants to Just Steal It through a ‘special tax’ rather than ‘negotiating deals’, the more legal method Trump would use, but that’s Bernie for you.

ScienceAlert.

Do you really, really, really like the ocean?

Do you like it so much that you would spend multiple days living on the seafloor in a structure that is part laboratory, part dormitory, and part diving vessel?

Soon, a crew of ‘aquanauts’ will do exactly that, inhabiting the first iteration of Vanguard, a short-term stay subsea habitat designed by ocean engineering company DEEP.

More fembot ‘journalism’. What’s important is not what you KNOW but rather what you FEEL.

Stick with it, though; eventually she will get around to the point.

(Who, What, When, Where, Why? Fuggedaboutit.)

Quanta.

t was 9 a.m. on a Thursday, and Martin Picard was watching his blood flow from an IV in his arm through a hole in the wall. He was sitting on a twin bed in a claustrophobic chamber less than a shoulder’s width from a stainless steel sink and porcelain toilet. Every hour over 24 hours, including while he slept, a nurse channeled blood from his arm to a research team next door; at each time point, if he was awake, he also provided a saliva sample and filled out a survey about his mood.

As with any article written by a female, no information is communicated in the first three paragraphs—the primary need is for a little story so you can identify properly with whomever the story is about (or cultivate an appropriate aversion, if it’s about somebody like Donald Trump or Elon Musk). Stick with it, though; eventually she’ll get around to the point.

The American Mind.

Johann Kurtz’s essay on why younger generations feel left behind economically, even while official statistics from GDP to stock markets send signals that our economy is thriving, touched a nerve.

Kurtz’s central argument is that young people only appear to be doing fine in official statistics because those measures fail to capture the collapse of “social capital”—the free inheritance of trusted neighbors, functional public schools, safe streets, and marriageable norms that previous generations received at no cost. Because that commons has been liquidated and privatized, young people must now repurchase its components individually at market prices. Expensive homes in good districts, private schooling, daycare, credentials, and more—all of it requires substantial financial resources, even as incomes have risen only modestly. Meanwhile, the cost of these essentials has increased many times over.

The result is a measurement failure: cheap electronics and rising nominal incomes make the young look prosperous, but the actual building blocks of a middle-class life have moved beyond the reach of average Americans, which explains why younger generations are delaying or forgoing them entirely.

Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

It’s complicated.

Watch it.

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

Don’t open that attachment … it might contain a virus.

Watch it.

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

ATQUE: The Economics of Owning a Medieval Tavern

Just in case the castle is beyond your price point.

Read it.

The importance of codifying into law the guarantee of affordable, reliable energy for all Americans is driven home by the current turmoil surrounding Honda, which “reported its first annual loss since becoming a publicly traded company in Japan seven decades ago,” as reported by the New York Times back in May.

Why did a company considered one of the most stable in the world suddenly suffer such a catastrophic about-face? In large part because it relied on Biden administration policies designed to funnel industries into a future where fossil fuels would be completely phased out.

It’s all about the clicks.

Sarah Hoyt.

Societies don’t cope well with technological innovation that changes the way people live every day. Because once you change the way people live every day, you’re changing the way people interact, which means the structures of society are going to start not working the way they were intended to.

Right now we’re in a time of catastrophic innovation. What does that mean? It means that we’ve reached a point where innovation is building on innovation — which is to be fair what innovation does. First someone figures out how to dig in the ground and plant some seeds and next thing you know someone is planting kale, and then you have to kill them and… ahem… — and the new one is dropping before we’ve even started to process the effects of the last one.

Honestly, the Heinlein time line (not that one. I was told I can no longer mention that particular story here, not without doing the whole Black Adder dance for when someone mentions the Scottish Play) would have been easier on our institutions as they were when he wrote the juveniles. Going to space would just be a continuation of the westward expansion, and at least on earth there was no big innovation on communication and putting the power of communication in the hands of individual to counter the centralized big media. (Or the power of manufacturing, to counter centralized big industry. Okay, we’re on the early stages of that, but it could easily be the next big break through.) In fact, he had Earth become more and more the worst aspects of FDR, to be honest.

But no. We weren’t allowed to go to space (no, you can’t possibly convince me it wasn’t deliberate. The way the left hates any attempt at space exploration and becomes insane with their FEFer (Fix Earth First) bullshit, you know they did what they could to prevent us leaving this rock.) And so some geeks in garages created the internet revolution. Yes, yes, I now. Government, but be real. If it hadn’t escaped into private lands and cat memes, it would still be unimportant to all but defense geeks.

And that… well, that escaped containment again, at least in the US right after 9/11, when a lot of us trying to figure out what was happening and what should happen hit the internet and a lot of the big blogs now originated. And then there was social media, and then–

Well. Here we are.

Babylon Bee.

Sure, I believe that.

David Appleton:

I don’t want artificial intelligence to write books and make art; I want artificial intelligence to do the dishes and and the laundry so I can write books and make art.

Full disclosure: Dave is a friend of mine and doesn’t claim this to be original with him. Nevertheless, I think that spreading good thoughts ought to be encouraged.

Government: Butty Fucky

Read it.

For centuries, we’ve been covering thinning locks with wigs, and more recently started grabbing at regrowth with hair plugs, topical ointments, and oral treatments. But it turns out the simplest, or rather the most natural, solution might be key to keeping your mop—and it’s been hiding beneath our feet the whole time.

In a December 2025 scientific review, a team of researchers from across China found that an ancient Chinese medicinal root could be the titan that stops balding in its tracks—not only by slowing hair loss, but also by encouraging regrowth. Perhaps even more shocking, the findings are also reshaping history, as they imply that scientific understanding was more advanced than previously believed. The paper was published in the peer-reviewed Journal of Holistic Integrative Pharmacy.

The team focused on a root known as the Polygonum multiflorum. Also known as the Chinese climbing knotweed or Fo Ti, practitioners have historically used the root for hair loss and hair graying, tuberculosis, erectile dysfunction, as well as for a myriad of other conditions. Fo Ti is native to China, though people have cultivated it elsewhere, including in the United States. Traditionally, Fo Ti is prepared before use, often in teas, tonics, ointments, or pills.

Read it.

There is already a thing called the Factorio effect. Ask anyone who has lost a weekend to the game and they will tell you it is the compulsion, the just-one-more-belt loop that turns midnight into dawn, the way the factory crawls into your head and starts asking to grow while you are trying to sleep. That is the famous version. It is not the one I mean.

The version I mean is what the game was quietly doing to the people who played it. Factorio is a few hundred hours of training in a single discipline: how to run a system of autonomous producers that you do not personally operate. You do not place the iron on the belt by hand. You build the machine that does, and the machine that feeds that machine, and then you step back and supervise a thing that runs without you. You learn to think in throughput instead of tasks, in bottlenecks instead of effort, in blueprints instead of buildings. You learn that the factory is the unit of work, not the wrench.

That is the exact skill the AI software factory now demands, and almost nobody was taught it on purpose. The people picking up agent orchestration fastest are not the ones with the most LLM theory. They are the ones who already spent a year of evenings learning, in their hands, that you do not do the work, you build the thing that does the work, and then you keep the thing alive. The game was a flight simulator for a cockpit that had not been built yet. Now it has been built, and the simulator hours transfer.

I have a copy of the Factorio game, although I haven’t played it yet; I’m sure I’ll get around to it Real Soon Now in my Copious Free Time.

“God made man. Colt made them equal.”

May you live in memory eternal.

Don’t forge the red & blue blankets.