Read it.

In the latest expression of China’s rapidly growing and modernizing naval power, the People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) recently, and for the first time, put three aircraft carriers to sea simultaneously. Of the three carriers involved in these activities, the Liaoning and the Shandong are by now well established with the Chinese fleet, while the Fujian, the country’s first domestically produced carrier, is still preparing for operational service. Ultimately, it’s expected to lead to more Chinese-made flattops as the PLAN continues to expand its naval aviation capabilities.

Publicly available data, collated below by journalist Ian Ellis, indicates that, as of last week, the Liaoning and its carrier group were operating in the Philippine Sea, with the Shandong and its carrier group just off Hainan Island. Meanwhile, the Fujian had already left Jiangnan shipyard in Shanghai for another round of sea trials, with satellite imagery confirming that the three carriers were all sailing as of September 18. The carrier groups for the first two flattops each include at least four destroyers as well as a combat support vessel or frigate, very likely also accompanied by a hunter-killer submarine.

No indication of a flag bridge or a Primary Flight Control area on the one in the picture.

The late great Holly Lisle:

None of us is ever as good as we can get. We can always learn more; we can always do better.

Read it.

As tensions between Israel and Hezbollah have shot up to new highs, Israeli soldiers anticipating being deployed to the north are increasingly turning for help to the civilian donation efforts that have kept them stocked in Gaza.

Adi Vaxman, who heads the U.S.-based donation effort called Operation Israel, fields requests from individual soldiers and says demand has spiked in tandem with security developments involving Hezbollah.

“With the situation up north, the demand has tripled in the last few days,” Vaxman told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency last week. She said the total requests by soldiers in September are on pace to reach double the roughly 15,000 requests from August.

Nothing illustrates the essential inferiority of dependence on the government than efforts such as these. There used to be a site, the link for which I long ago lost, where you could go online and pay for a pizza to be delivered to Israeli soldiers.

Read it.

I’ll bet there’s a hell of a story behind that.

Read it.

In sum, the real driver here is political and ideological alignment, not individual behaviors influencing policy support. The authors, caught in their academic bubble, overlook the obvious: people who buy into the climate crisis narrative will support all the policies and behaviors at once—not as a result of any behavioral spillover, but because they see it all as part of the same belief system.

No wonder the population growth rate is less than replacement.

Read it.

We’ll show you how archivists package (or “house”) the most common types of physical documents for long-term storage. That is, we’ll talk boxes and files. And we’ll benefit from the experience of special contributors from the United Kingdom to compare how archivists in Canada and the UK commonly do their packaging.

Much of what we know about times past is because some people saved stuff that most of us would have thrown out. Just sayin’.

(No, I didn’t know that Archivist Barbie was a thing. Ya larn suthin new everday.)

CNN. 

Death is God’s way of telling you, ‘No, that was a bad idea.’

Think of it as evolution in action.

Read it.

Several years ago, I was involved in a case that illuminates the difficult position many doctors today find themselves in. The patient was pregnant, close to delivery, and experiencing dangerous declines in her baby’s heart rate. She had been on a blood thinner, which kept me, the anesthesiologist, from placing an epidural in her back. She also had strange airway anatomy, which would make it a struggle to put her to sleep quickly if an emergency cesarean section became necessary. I advised the obstetrician to perform an elective cesarean section now, in advance, while we had good working conditions, and not to wait for an emergency, where time is of the essence, and where the delay needed to induce general anesthesia might seriously injure the baby.

The obstetrician grew quiet. She seemed to descend within herself, in that lonely region of stress and strife where people feel themselves to be in an untenable position. Several things worried her, she confessed. First, hospital management had already warned her that her high cesarean section rate made her an outlier among her colleagues, which put her job at risk. Second, the baby’s heart rate did not quite meet the criteria for when to perform a cesarean section. True, the current situation was unfamiliar and unforeseen; then again, she wondered, would hospital management, let alone the malpractice lawyers, accept that excuse? Third, she wondered how to persuade the patient to have an operation that her own rules seemed to advise against.

The changing work environment in which many doctors practice medicine leads to such moments of uncertainty—and all but guarantees that they will occur more frequently. As more doctors work for large companies, they have bosses they must answer to. Rules for how to practice medicine have multiplied exponentially, and their bureaucratic enforcement makes doctors afraid to violate them. With science forming the bulk of their medical and post-graduate education, doctors also feel bewildered when faced with questions that touch on the moral, the political, and the philosophical.

I hear ya.

Babylon Bee.

Satire–Read it quickly before it becomes true.

ZMan: “The world kind of sucks right now….”

Babylon Bee.

Satire–Read it quickly before it comes true.

New York Post.

Something caught my attention this week that revealed a deep, dark, shameful secret about single women.

Many of us — okay, let me clarify, not me (for once) — seem to be like a bull to a red rag when it comes to married men.

It appears that a wedding ring is seen as a challenge by many. Shame, shame, shameful behavior.

Don’t believe me? I have proof.

You see, it all started during my weekly Instagram Saucy Secrets confessional that I host every Monday night. A guy wrote in and said: “I’ve been married for 2.5 years and I have never had so many women approach me. When I was single I barely got noticed. I don’t like this attention, but is it normal?”

Yes, it is. In evolutionary biology, the term for this is ‘pre-selection’, and (to be clear) the single woman doesn’t want to ‘date a married man’, she wants him to get rid of his current wife (or, these days, girlfriend) and take up with her instead. Women want men than other women want, because the intersexual evaluation process is more work for a woman than for a man (“Is she hot? Is she available?) and so married men are like having a pre-approved mortgage loan when looking to buy a house–the hard work has already been mostly done for them.

This is explained in great detail in Dr. Orion Taraban’s recent book The Value of Others, which I highly recommend.

Babylon Bee.

Satire–read it quickly before it comes true.

Read it.

At last month’s Democratic National Convention, men lined up to have themselves sterilized outside the conference center. You probably heard. So-called “reproductive rights” were one of the key issues of the Convention, which also had a giant inflatable IUD stationed close to the entrance, just in case attendees were in any doubt.

I fully support any movement to encourage Democrat men to get vasectomies and will gladly contribute monetarily to any such program.

Furthermore, I will equally strongly support a similar program to persuade Democrat women to get their tubes tied.

Think of it as evolution in action.

Read it.

Apparently the Demcorat Party is no longer the party of the working class.

Read it.

In science fiction movies like Frankenstein and Re-Animator, human bodies are revived, existing in a strange state between life and death. While this may seem like pure fantasy, a recent study suggests that a “third state” of existence might actually be present in modern biology.

According to the researchers, this third state occurs when the cells of a dead organism continue to function after its death, sometimes gaining new capabilities they never had while the organism was alive.

Read it.

Best to lean Greek and read it in the original, but hey, whatever works.

[Insert plug for the value of memorizing poetry here.]

The Illiad and the Odyssey were to Greek culture what the Bible is to ours–everybody used (and recognized) a lot of phrases from them and used those phrases in daily life.

How small of all that human hearts endure
The part that laws or kings can cause or cure;
Still to ourselves in every place consign’d,
Our own felicity we make or find.

Babylon Bee.

Satire–read it quickly before it becomes true.

Read it.

In 2002, the FDA approved Suboxone, a new medication to treat opioid use disorder. Suboxone is a compound of two drugs that decreases one’s cravings for opioids while blocking their effects. It is safer and less cumbersome than methadone, which requires daily or weekly visits to a clinic, and more effective than any abstinence-based treatment, which requires people to withstand cravings and suppress physical discomfort. In clinical trials, Suboxone was shown to help opioid users avoid jail time and to decrease their mortality by over 50 percent. “You’d think that anything that can help save a heroin addict’s life would be seen as a good thing,” the writer and academic Michael Clune wrote in 2014, a year that marked an inflection point in an epidemic of fentanyl-related deaths. “So why, then, when I touted Suboxone at an Narcotics Anonymous meeting with a bunch of regulars did they look at me as if I’d gone insane?”

Clune has a history of heroin addiction (he wrote, to my mind, one of the great heroin-addiction memoirs) but successfully wrestled his demons into submission through a stay in rehab, diligent attendance at Narcotics Anonymous, exercise, and an enigmatic, epiphanic experience of grace. He knows how lucky he is to have overcome his addiction through struggle and also knows how rarely his strategy works for others. But when he proposed to friends in the recovery community that Suboxone is a worthy tool, they were upset; they were skeptical of a fix so expedient, so simple, so biological. “That’s like telling someone that smoking crack will get their mind off booze,” one NA longtimer argued. “Your recovery is based on a spiritual awakening,” another explained to Clune angrily. To this friend, Suboxone — a magic pill that changes the brain — would foreclose a person’s chance of personal transformation.

UnHerd.

It’s difficult to imagine this quiet bucolic corner of London being the point of origin of the defining dystopia of modern times. Yet, according to literary folklore, it was here in a Canonbury beer garden, in the shadow of a vast horse chestnut, that George Orwell first conceived the idea for 1984. The location would even make it chillingly into the novel: “Under the spreading chestnut tree, I sold you and you sold me…” Of course, this was a very different London, of ration books and bomb sites, and a recently widowed Orwell was already coughing up blood from the tuberculosis that would kill him. The future was, understandably, to be afraid of. Yet the seeds of 1984 originated decades earlier and over a thousand miles away, blowing in across the seas from what had been St Petersburg.

Yeah, I’m interested in almost anything having to do with Orwell. Feel free to skip it if you aren’t.

Read it.

Nine chapters into his book The Unaccountability Machine, Dan Davies makes a little self-deprecatory joke. He had intended to write a detective mystery about cybernetics, he says, but has spent eight chapters describing the construction of the murder weapon.

The question that Davies starts out with is about how it is that the modern organisation has become structured in structured in such a way that when bad things happen, to customers, or users, or suppliers, no one can be found to be accountable for these poor outcomes.

Read it.

Taylor Swift’s post-debate endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, appears to have completely backfired. A new post-debate poll from YouGov released Saturday found that while 8% of voters said Swift’s endorsement made them “somewhat” or “much more likely” to support the Democratic ticket, a significant 20% said they are “somewhat” or “much less likely” to vote for former President Donald Trump’s opponent after Swift spoke out.

The majority of respondents, however – 66% – said Swift’s high-profile endorsement made no difference in how they will vote in the upcoming November election, according to the NY Post.

ZMan:

It has been fascinating to watch the Haitian cat devouring meme go viral as it was both hilarious and illustrative of the problem facing the managerial regime. Largely due to Musk owning Twitter, now stupidly called X, there was little the regime could do to stop the spread of AI generated images of Trump defending house pets from Kamala and her animalistic Haitians. Regime toadies online were left to snootily do the “but actually” meme in response to it.

It reminded people of 2016 when clever people created MAGA art as well as anti-Clinton meme campaigns that were often far cleverer than what came from Trump. This is why they moved heaven and earth to shut this stuff down for the 2020 election. There is no way we get the Haitian cat devouring story if the cranks were still running Twitter. Of course, this assumes that workarounds had not been found to get around the censorship.

Read it.

To curate something is a curious act. Bring two items together, and you’ve made a collection. You’ve just curated. One of the OED definitions for curation is “The selection of items for a collection: The selection of items, such as documents, music, or internet content, for inclusion in a collection or on a website.” This could range from the mundane task of curating clothes for an outfit (a collection) to the sophisticated act of curating cultural artifacts for an exhibition. There are even less obvious, or at least, less intentional acts of curation, like selecting items for an Amazon shopping cart. Yet that would also qualify as curation.

New York Post.

Taylor Swift’s endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, may turn more voters away than it attracts.

A new post-debate poll from YouGov released Saturday found that 8% of voters said the pop superstar’s nod is either “somewhat” or “much more likely” to convince them to cast their ballot for the Democrat. But a whopping 20% said they are “somewhat” or “much less likely” to vote for former President Donald Trump’s opponent now that Swift has spoken.

 

Read it.

After an absent-minded guest left a bag of Cheetos deep within Carlsbad Caverns, the National Park Service (NPS) responded with a stern warning. Unsightly trash and plastic pollution aren’t the only issues, they cautioned; the garbage could have had a significant impact on the wider ecosystem of the ancient cave system.

The bag of food was dropped in Carlsbad Caverns’ so-called Big Room, the largest single cave chamber by volume in North America, which takes around an hour of walking underground to reach.

Left to fester in the pits of the humid cave, the full bag of cheesy snacks sent a tiny shockwave through the local ecosystem.

“The processed corn, softened by the humidity of the cave, formed the perfect environment to host microbial life and fungi. Cave crickets, mites, spiders, and flies soon organize into a temporary food web, dispersing the nutrients to the surrounding cave and formations. Molds spread higher up the nearby surfaces, fruit, die and stink. And the cycle continues,” the NPS said in a Facebook post.

“At the scale of human perspective, a spilled snack bag may seem trivial, but to the life of the cave it can be world-changing,” they explained.

“Just because they really are out to get you doesn’t mean you aren’t paranoid. If they’ve been after you long enough, paranoia can become a reflex.”

— Steven Brust, Issola

Babylon Bee.

Satire–read it quick, before it comes true.

“Why won’t you become Orthodox, my friend?”

“Because your priests look like foreigners and your bishops look like hoboes.”

“Hmmm. Can’t say you’re wrong.”

CNN.

The two NASA astronauts who piloted the first crewed test flight of Boeing’s Starliner capsule — and were left behind on the space station as the beleaguered spacecraft returned to Earth — took questions on Friday for the first time in weeks.

Butch Wilmore, a Tennessee native and former Navy test pilot, said during the conversation that he and crewmate Suni Williams were “very fortunate” to have the ability to stay on the International Space Station a few more months and come home using a back-up option: hitching a ride on a SpaceX-made Crew Dragon vehicle.

“There’s many cases in the past where there have not been other options,” Wilmore said.

You’ll be glad you did.

Read it.

Researchers from the Sonia & Marco Nadler Institute of Archaeology at Tel Aviv University have used a range of modern technologies, including drones, remote sensing, and 3D digital modeling, to generate the first objective, quantified analysis of the Roman siege system at Masada. Findings indicate that, contrary to the widespread myth, the Roman army’s siege of Masada in 73 CE lasted no more than a few weeks.

Read it.

Nothing exposes the mythical thinking behind learned helplessness better than Stockholm syndrome: a diagnosis assigned to women who show affection for their captors, and a distrust of authority. It’s a classic throw-away line we use to describe the mental condition of domestic abuse victims, but it’s also a term that’s still taken seriously by some psychologists. ‘A classic example [of Stockholm syndrome] is domestic violence,’ says Oxford psychologist Jennifer Wild, ‘when someone – typically a woman – has a sense of dependency on her partner and stays with him.’

But Stockholm syndrome – a dubious pathology with no diagnostic criteria – is riddled with misogyny and founded on a lie. The psychiatrist who invented it, Nils Bejerot, never spoke to the woman he based it on, never bothered to ask her why she trusted her captors more than the authorities. More to the point, during the Swedish bank heist that inspired the syndrome, Bejerot was the psychiatrist leading the police response. He was the authority that Kristin Enmark – the first woman diagnosed with Stockholm syndrome – distrusted.

Babylon Bee.

In an attempt to sway voters away from voting for former President Donald Trump, a group of well-known leaders from different fields — politics, religion, and entertainment — came together to publicly voice their support for their chosen candidate.