Watch it.

I’ve always thought that the best intro to the ‘Ten Commandments’ would be ‘Don’t do stupid shit, including but not limited to the following examples’.

Babylon Bee.

Satire–read it quickly before it becomes true.

Read it.

The term “middle class” is thrown around all the time—especially during an election year—but what does it really mean? And more importantly, are you part of it? While definitions can vary, being middle class is closely tied to the idea of the “American dream,” the notion that with hard work and sound financial management, you should be able to afford a home, raise a family, and eventually enjoy a comfortable retirement. Emphasis on the “dream.”

If that identity is important to you (and I can’t see why it would), we have the technology.

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The plan was born in 1997 when Princeton researchers Daniel Janzen and Winnie Hallwachs approached Costa Rican orange juice manufacturer Del Oro with a unique opportunity.

If Del Oro agreed to donate part of its land bordering the Guanacaste Conservation Area to the national park, the company would be allowed to dump its discarded orange peel at no cost on degraded land in the park.

The juice company agreed to the deal, and some 12,000 tonnes of waste orange peel carried by a convoy of 1,000 truckloads was unceremoniously dumped on virtually lifeless soils at the site.

The deluge of nutrient-rich organic waste had an almost instantaneous effect on the fertility of the land.

“[W]ithin about six months the orange peels had been converted from orange peels into this thick black loamy soil,” Treuer told Scientific American.

Win-win, right? Well, not exactly.

Despite this promising start, the conservation experiment wasn’t to last, after a rival juice manufacturer called TicoFruit sued Del Oro, alleging that its competitor had “defiled a national park”.

Costa Rica’s Supreme Court sided with TicoFruit, and the ambitious experiment was forced to end, which saw the site largely forgotten about for the next 15 years.

Reminding us, once again, that government screws up everything it touches.

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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.

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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.

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

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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.

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While it is popular to think that there are no real biological reasons for why women generally didn’t fight in history, that is not the case. In reality, differences between men and women are quite significant, and are a result of basic biological factors such as genes / chromosomes and sex hormones. Even the same genes may express themselves differently due to impact of sex hormones. Both men and women produce the sex hormones (testosterone, oestradiol and progesterone), but their quantity can vary by several orders of magnitude depending on sex and menopausal status. So can their effects: while testosterone in men may inhibit muscle degradation pathways, this effect was not observed in women. These differences have major implications for womens’ ability to perform in combat – and especially in the melee. So here I will look at the why female warriors were so rare, and finally at some historical evidence of warrior women that did exist.

And while argument could be made that fantasy does not need to keep with reality, fact is that most fantasy settings simply have normal humans living in them with some minor supernatural or simply fantasy elements surrounding them. In One Piece, where superpowers gained through Devil Fruits as well as sheer willpower (Haki) dominate combat, it is not unrealistic to have women fight as well (and it should be noted that One Piece is still realistic in that women are generally weaker than men in the setting). Same goes for other supernatural settings relying on magical combat, such as Fairy Tail, Codex Alera and similar. After all, physical limitations matter far less for people who can levitate objects with their minds. But in a historical or low-magic setting such as Lord of the Rings or A Song of Ice and Fire, female warriors are – and should be – exceptionally rare.

Women were not crafted by evolution for war, as men are. Robert Heinlein was fond of saying, “Women are what we fight for, not what we fight with.” Putting women in combat is like shooting your enemies with golden bullets–sure, you can do that, but why would you want to?

No wonder the population growth rate is less than replacement.

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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.

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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.

ZMan surveys the inner space.

A change that has happened in the culture of the West that has gone largely unnoticed is the concern for psychological states. A generation ago, what mattered in most cases was the material state of things. Governments cared about the economy in terms of measurables like inflation and GDP. Now they care about how “marginalized groups” are feeling about their social status. Large employers now worry about employee wellness, rather than financial benefits.

This is a shift from the objective to the subjective. Inflation is a thing you can measure, even if there are disputes about how the measures are done. Prices are either rising, falling, or remaining the same. The impact of inflation on the psychological state of consumer is another matter. There is no way to objectively describe such a thing, much less produce a metric for it. The only thing to go on are the opinions of people who claim to be experts in these sorts of soft areas.

You see the same shift in the workplace. In the prior century, managers focused on objective measures like productivity and the cost of labor. The manager in charge of benefits focused on driving down the costs of those benefits, while increasing the value to the employee. Now the point of a benefits plan is to increase employee wellness, which cannot be measured, only assessed. More importantly, there is no way to connect employer behavior to the result.

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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.

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

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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.

ZMan looks at war tech.

It has been said that a good sniper team can defeat a battalion, which is an exaggeration, but there is some truth to it. Snipers have been a highly effective way to slow down an opposing force. This is especially true for an army facing a much larger opponent, as was the case for the Finns in the Winter War. Finnish snipers harassed the Red Army to the point where they could not advance, despite having an enormous advantage in men and material.

The drone is something like the high-tech sniper. A competent drone team can harass an opponent from a distance, forcing the opponent to find cover. Unlike the sniper, the drone operator can target equipment. An armored unit advancing toward an enemy position can be knocked out by a drone unit, without taking fire. They attack the column to stall it, pass on the geolocation to their artillery units, then move to a new spot in order to repeat the process until the column is destroyed.

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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.

ZMan has some fun.

The most popular and probably the most effective argument from faith used in favor of open borders is that all men are created in God’s image. Since we are all God’s children, we have the same duty to cat-eating Haitians as we do to the Irish guy who drives the UPS truck and helps coach the local football team. Since immigration is an issue because it is the movement of nonwhites into white areas, it is a racial issue, and the Christian is prohibited from seeing race.

The obvious counter to this is that Jesus was fine with slavery, so he surely would not oppose the deportation of illegal aliens. This never registers with the Bible-quoting immigration enthusiast because much of what makes up modern Christianity in the West is cherry picking verses from Scripture that just so happen to support the secular morality of this age. For the most part, what passes for Christianity in the West is just a loyal servant at the foot of neo-liberalism.

That still leaves the question as to whether Jesus would be on the side of the people important pet-eating Haitians into your town or on the side of the people making AI-generated memes of Trump defending the house cats. The logic of Christianity says that Jesus would be pumping out those cat memes. He would not be making overtly racial claims about Haitians, most likely, but what we understand about Christian faith tells us he would be opposed to mass migration.

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.

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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.

 

The Spectator.

It’s a Wednesday evening, and I’m getting psyched up to go catch a pedophile with the boys. Playlist on, rocking down the A12 and chatting to my new mate, Nick, in his van. There’s a man not far from here who thinks he’s going to meet an underage girl tonight. He doesn’t know that we’ll be pulling up instead and that his sick fantasy — and his life as he knows it — will be over.

Nick is a guy I met on Facebook who runs a team of pedophile hunters called London Overwatch. He says that he’s caught 300 pedophiles, and that tonight’s is one of the worst. This man believes he has been talking to a 14-year-old girl and has apparently been sending her obscene videos while he’s on holiday with his family. The “girl” is really a woman on Nick’s team.

T-minus one hour before the meeting, and we park at a local health club just around the corner. The team assembles: Ben, George, Tony, Michael and Abdul. All friendly Essex boys. We discuss whether you can spot a pedophile in the street judging only by the clothes somebody wears. Yes, it’s agreed, they wear Slazenger or Lonsdale. We talk about fishing and about how Ben recently visited the no. 2 ranked sushi restaurant in the world.

The Spectator.

Last week, on a Swedish train somewhere between Linkoping and Mjolby, as I struggled to open a bag of cheesy snacks that was to serve as my lunch, my travel companions began unwrapping their own picnics. Some, like me, had made hasty and unappetizing purchases at the station. Others had carefully curated lunches, assembled earlier in the day from our hotel’s lavish breakfast buffet. Well-filled rolls, pieces of fruit, pastries. In they tucked.

I was suddenly aware of a frisson of stance-taking rippling through our group. There were those who regarded buffet plundering as theft and those who defended it as plain common sense. Women were more likely to have taken food, but then women are generally more likely to make advance preparations for lunch. I noticed schisms even within families and between close friends. And then there was me, who had never before given the matter any thought, nor realized it was a thing people did.

It is, apparently, a very British habit. The Germans may be on the march at dawn, annexing sun loungers, and Italians may not have the faintest idea about queuing, but it’s the Brits who secrete breakfast goods about their person and spirit them away in order to economize on lunch.

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.