Read it.

The Golden Dome for America (GDA) initiative has drawn criticism for not publicly releasing a detailed architecture, cost breakdown, or long-range budget projections. Think tanks, major media outlets, and some lawmakers argue that without public transparency the program risks becoming an expensive, open-ended undertaking.

Those concerns deserve to be taken seriously. But they often treat public disclosure as an unquestioned virtue. Revealing how the system works would give our adversaries the information they need to blunt it.

We don’t disclose budget information or performance characteristics for nuclear submarines, the F-35 and other sensitive air vehicles, or spy satellites developed by [the National Reconnaissance Office]. Demanding public disclosure of GDA is akin to asking the United States to publish a playbook for defeating it.

This reality is not theoretical. China and Russia have already criticized Golden Dome as destabilizing and driving an arms race. In this environment, withholding key details is not only prudent—it is imperative.

As they do….

Read it.

Iran is most often discussed as a nonproliferation problem, a sponsor of terrorism, a regional spoiler. Each of these framings captures a real problem, but none captures what matters most. The nuclear file, the militia archipelago stretching from Lebanon to Yemen, the question of Gulf security architecture: these only acquire their full meaning when read against the backdrop of Chinese grand strategy.

Beijing has spent years and billions of dollars building Iran into a structural asset. Everything that follows in the Middle East flows from this fact. Which is why Operation Epic Fury is the first American military campaign that threatens to sever that asset. By striking Iran directly, the Trump administration is dismantling, whether by design or by consequence, a pillar of China’s regional architecture.

The urgency of saying so plainly has never been greater. In June 2025, Israel launched Operation Rising Lion, a 12-day campaign of precision strikes that destroyed Iranian enrichment facilities, killed over 30 senior commanders and a dozen nuclear scientists, and drew the United States into direct strikes on 3 nuclear sites. The Islamic Republic’s deterrent mythology, cultivated over four decades, collapsed within a fortnight. In late December, the largest protests since 1979 erupted across all 31 provinces, fueled by economic freefall and a population that no longer believed in the regime’s strength. The government responded in January 2026 with massacres that killed thousands, prompting the European Union to designate the IRGC as a terrorist organization and further increasing the isolation of the regime.

By any conventional measure, the Islamic Republic is weaker than at any point in its history. Yet China was moving to put it back together. This week, it was reported that Tehran was close to finalizing a deal for Chinese-made supersonic anti-ship cruise missiles, weapons capable of threatening American carriers now massing in the Persian Gulf. Earlier, Chinese suppliers shipped over 1,000 tons of sodium perchlorate, a key missile propellant ingredient, to the Iranian port of Bandar Abbas, enough to rebuild a substantial portion of the ballistic missile stockpile that Israel had just spent 12 days destroying.

Understanding why Beijing would do this and what it means for the United States requires looking beyond Iran and toward the broader contest in which Iran plays a role.

Dean  Ball.

Senior Policy Advisor for Artificial Intelligence and Emerging Technology under Trump

At some point during my lifetime—I am not sure when—the American republic as we know it began to die. Like most natural deaths, the causes are numerous and interwoven. No one incident, emergency, attack, president, political party, law, idea, person, corporation, technology, mistake, betrayal, failure, misconception, or foreign adversary “caused” death to begin, though all those things and more contributed. I don’t know where we are in the death process, but I know we are in the hospice room. I’ve known it for a while, though I have sometimes been in denial, as all mourners are wont to do. I don’t like to talk about it; I am at the stage where talking about it usually only inflicts pain.

Unfortunately, however, I cannot carry out my job as a writer today with the level of analytic rigor you expect from me without acknowledging that we are sitting in hospice. It is increasingly difficult to honestly discuss the developments of frontier AI, and what kind of futures we should aim to build, without acknowledging our place at the deathbed of the republic as we know it. Except there is no convenient machine to decide for us that the patient has died. We just have to sit and watch.

Our republic has died and been reborn again more than once in America’s history. America has had multiple “foundings.” Perhaps we are on the verge of another rebirth of the American republic, another chapter in America’s continual reinvention of itself. I hope so. But it may be that we have no more virtue or wisdom to fuel such a founding, and that it is better to think of ourselves as transitioning gradually into an era of post-republic American statecraft and policymaking. I do not pretend to know.

The Times (UK).

Reports of crimes against MPs have hit record-breaking levels, with cases doubling in two years to nearly 1,000 annually, driven by a surge in abuse and threats to kill.

Harassment cases have increased almost fivefold and reports of threats to kill have tripled since 2019, according to data obtained via a freedom of information (FOI) request to the National Police Chiefs’ Council.

Female MPs told The Times that threats to life had become “standard” and that the surge in cases was “sadly not surprising”.

You knew the job was dangerous when you took it, Fred.

Alma Boykin.

Chicago style – the filling is under the cheese (foot notes)

APA style – stuffed crust (parenthetical citations)

Read it.

Shortly after meeting with Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leader Xi Jinping in late October, President Donald Trump said China would never attack Taiwan while he is president because Chinese officials “know the consequences.” While support from the United States is welcome news for Taiwan, Trump’s words raise a real question: Does Xi actually know the cost of invading Taiwan?

Much of the analysis of a potential Beijing attempt to seize Taiwan by force has centered on the Chinese military’s capabilities and Taiwan’s defenses, especially if supported by the United States. Many assessments conclude that the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) is not currently capable of defeating the U.S. military in a direct conflict.

However, analysts still warn of a worst-case scenario in which Xi, seeking to cement his legacy, launches a premature strike. Xi has tied his legitimacy to the “China Dream” of national rejuvenation by 2049 and has framed unifying Taiwan with the mainland as essential to achieving that goal.

I know the feeling.

Daily Record (UK).

A clinical and forensic psychologist has put forward the extraordinary suggestion that Jeffrey Epstein could still be alive, following her examination of a crucial element within the Epstein files. Published by the Justice Department, the archives contains millions of documents, images, videos, and emails chronicling the activities of the convicted paedophile.

Numerous files also illuminate his connections to public figures, politicians, and celebrities – although nobody named has faced charges or prosecution for any offence. Dr Leslie Dobson, who maintains she’s collaborating directly with the United States Congress on the files, argues that some of the bombshell discoveries represent merely the tip of the iceberg.

“A lot of the names are redacted, so it could have been other people,” she stated, referencing certain emails. Addressing the extensive correspondence to and from Epstein, Leslie continued: “They’re corresponding back and forth and that’s in writing. Imagine what they’re talking about on the phone?”.

Whilst a substantial portion of the files remains heavily redacted, Leslie asserts that she and cyber hackers have succeeded in uncovering some hidden information, reports the Mirror.

UPDATE: Hillary Clinton Says She Only Recalls Meeting Epstein That One Time When She Murdered Him (Babylon Bee)

Read it.

Taipei should “flood” the Taiwan Strait with drones and other UAV-based defensive systems in readiness for invasion by Chinese forces.

That’s the advice of U.S. think tank the Center for a New American Security (CNAS) in a report published on Thursday, February 27th. “Hellscape for Taiwan” argues that Taipei’s current approach to defense needs to be updated to match the growing strength of Beijing’s People’s Liberation Army. It also echoes Pentagon wargaming for the region, as reported in the summer of 2024.

A “hellscape,” in current military parlance, would result from the saturation of airspace and waters with thousands of drones and equivalent platforms. From here, invading forces could be struck from multiple domains at once. In this instance, Chinese ships and aircraft could lose superiority and incur heavy losses.

Read it.

For as much as I enjoy analyzing politics[1], I’m even more against discussing it with friends. This policy arose from three patterns observed over the years:

• Most people don’t have political views, they have political tribes
• Developing the political reasoning skills to graduate from tribes to views is incredibly difficult

and the kicker:

• Most people don’t want to graduate from tribes to views

Much like sports teams.

Read it.

When it is profitable to lie, people will lie. No one ought to need to tell you that.

Real Clear Defense.

As the Taiwanese legislature continues to debate the merits of a major defense spending bill by the Democratic Progressive Party (DDP). Taiwan must be aware that it risks being viewed by the West as an ally with a credible chance of being rapidly overwhelmed. As an alternative to the DDP’s proposed legislation, the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) introduced a bill which capped defence spending at NT$400 billion (12.6 billion USD) instead of NT$1.25 trillion (39.74 billion USD), while also omitting the provisions of the larger bill which called for the procurement of drone platforms, a larger integrated air defense system (IADS) know as the T-Dome, spare parts for attack helicopters, and more. Such a lack of preparation would reduce the opportunities allies have to come to its defense, especially if Taiwan seems politically weak, and the military balance of power appears too lop-sided in favor of China.

‘People’s Party’ tells you all you need to know about what they stand for.

Read it.

This post is about “real” hydrogen. Produced externally, at scale, using dedicated energy sources. Stored on the vehicle in high-pressure or cryogenic tanks. Consumed in a fuel cell that produces electricity to drive the wheels. No exhaust but water vapour.

This technology works. Hyundai has 165 XCIENT fuel cell trucks running commercially across Switzerland, Germany, France, the Netherlands and Austria, with another 63 in North America. The European fleet hit 20 million kilometres in January 2026. They haul food, beverages, textiles, and construction materials. They refuel in 10-20 minutes. They carry meaningful payloads over real distances.

None of them operate in the UK. That fact alone tells you something about where the problem lies.

The truck is not the problem. The problem is everything around it.

Read it.

A visual guide to the industrial processes you can no longer permit in the state of California — and the grandfathered facilities that still can.

Read it.

The convoluted story of how a species of dog first arrived in Australia and subsequently took over the Outback challenges fundamental notions about what it means to be “native.”

…

Indeed, the claim has been made that the dingo, whatever its origins, is now a fully wild animal, enmeshed in its ecosystem — and it cannot, therefore, be equated with domestic livestock or be condemned as a mere escaped dog. So the argument goes. This, however, is exactly the difficulty: The status “feral” almost by definition means it cannot be outgrown. Wildness and domesticity constitute a sharp, ontological binary, and the state of “feral-ness” is a catch-all label for any member of the latter group caught attempting to escape — quite hopelessly — the original sin of human companionship. The Midas touch of our species, whose brush invariably transmutes nature into artifice, can take lineages out of the wild, but it cannot put them back. Once a domestic, always a domestic. There is no requiem for the stray dog.

Every time I see a dingo I think “Carolina Yellow Dog”.

Coincidence? I think not….

Read it.

“We were at our richest from 1870 to 1913. That’s when we were a tariff country,” said President Donald Trump recently, and he’s not wrong. But tariffs aren’t the whole story. The genius of the Gilded Age was interstate regulatory and tax competition.

That economy boomed. From 1870 to 1913, America’s gross domestic product grew at nearly 5% per year. Even though America’s population nearly tripled during that time, with 30 million immigrants, per capita GDP doubled. Steel production boomed, surpassing Britain, France, and Germany combined. Railway miles quadrupled. A period that began amid the ruins of civil war ended with America in first place among the world’s great economic powers.

Washington collected lots of tariffs then, but little else. Before the 16th Amendment paved the way for federal income taxes in 1913, Congress was spending barely 1% of GDP—compared with nearly 25% today. Meanwhile, the federal power to regulate commerce was limited to transactions that actually crossed state lines, leaving the vast majority of regulation to the states.

The year 1913 was the year America went to shit: 16th Amendment (income tax), 17th Amendment (direct popular election of Senators, turning a republic into a democracy), Woodrow Wilson (fascism comes to America), the Federal Reserve (government gets to pee in the soup by printing money whenever it wants to).

Then 1919 put the last nails in the coffin: 18th Amendment (prohibition, giving us the Mafia), 19th Amendment (votes for women, giving us emotion-driven politics), and the Treaty of Versailles (giving us Hitler and eventually World War II).

My question is: What is the baby changing into?

MIT News.

Next time you cross a crowded plaza, crosswalk, or airport concourse, take note of the pedestrian flow. Are people walking in orderly lanes, single-file, to their respective destinations? Or is it a haphazard tangle of personal trajectories, as people dodge and weave through the crowd?

MIT instructor Karol Bacik and his colleagues studied the flow of human crowds and developed a first-of-its-kind way to predict when pedestrian paths will transition from orderly to entangled. Their findings may help inform the design of public spaces that promote safe and efficient thoroughfares.

SciTechDaily.

Although the world’s languages differ enormously in sound systems, vocabulary, and structure, researchers have long observed that certain grammatical patterns appear repeatedly across cultures. A new study finds that many of these recurring features may be more than a coincidence.

After applying advanced evolutionary modeling techniques, the researchers report that about one-third of the long-proposed “linguistic universals”—patterns believed to exist across all languages—show clear statistical support.

The international research team, led by Annemarie Verkerk (Saarland University) and Russell D. Gray (Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology), analyzed data from Grambank, the most extensive global database of grammatical features. They tested 191 proposed universals across more than 1,700 languages, making this one of the broadest examinations of cross-linguistic structure to date.

Read it.

Heat pumps are having a moment. Governments promote them, utilities love them, and they are, now more often than ever, described as an obvious replacement for fossil fuels (oil, coal, gas), fueled heating. The basic idea sounds great…a heat pump works like a reverse refrigerator. Instead of “pushing heat out, it pulls heat in”. That heat can come from the air outside your house or from the ground below it.

The International Energy Agency (IEA) sums up the enthusiasm nicely. “Heat pumps, powered by low?emissions electricity, are the central technology in the global transition to secure and sustainable heating. Heat pumps currently available on the market are three?to?five times more energy efficient than natural gas boilers. That statement contains three big claims:

(1) heat pumps are three to five times more efficient,

(2) they run on “low-emission” electricity, and

(3) they are secure and sustainable

All three deserve a closer look, so here we go…

Richard Vigilante.

71 days.

That’s how long it took Venom, a powerful, new, U.S. autonomous strike aircraft (aka a drone) to move from concept to flying prototype.

71 days. In traditional aerospace terms, that is almost indecent.

For decades, the path from concept to first flight has stretched across years. Requirements proliferated with each committee’s two cents. Design reviews accumulated. Tooling lead times expanded. Certification protocols hardened. Oversight layered on top. The system evolved to prevent embarrassment, not accelerate learning.

All that is going away. Elon Musk and Pete Hegseth are driving a radical improvement in how the U.S. military develops and acquires weapons, which, in turn, will radically change U.S. war fighting doctrine and ultimately transform U.S. manufacturing.

Read it.

There’s an obvious growing failure at the center of modern markets that, as a former short seller, has become beyond obvious to me over the years.

It isn’t just fraud or aggressive accounting. It’s the ecosystem that allows both to thrive: financial media that won’t press, and a sell side that won’t risk upsetting management teams they depend on for access.

We’ve seen this movie before. Enron did not implode because there were no warning signs. It imploded because the warning signs were inconvenient. There were whistleblowers. There were people inside the system who knew the numbers didn’t add up. But complexity was treated as brilliance, and skepticism was treated as cynicism. Analysts admired the innovation. Television hosts admired the executives.

And the stock went up—until it didn’t.

Covered-call option funds and ETFs are paying pretty nice dividends these days.

BBC, a Voice of the Crust.

Rituals come in many different forms and are practised in cultures the world over, but why have they become such an important part of our lives?

Because they reduce uncertainty. If you’ve done something once and it worked out well, you’d be stupid not to do it the same way that worked before. Duh.

When the anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski visited the Trobriand Islands in Papua New Guinea in the early 20th Century, he noted the elaborate preparations fishermen would make before setting out to sea. They would carefully paint their canoes with black, red and white paint, chanting spells as they did so. The vessel would be struck with wooden sticks, the bows stained with red ochre and crew members would adorn their arms with shells.

Malinowski recorded a long list of ceremonies and rituals the islanders would perform before venturing out onto the open sea. But when the fishermen went out into the nearby calm lagoon, they did not use these rites. Malinowski concluded that the “magic” rituals performed by the islanders were a response to help them cope with the unpredictable might of the Pacific Ocean.

Sometimes the old ways are best.

Read it.

God is angry at the Other Left Coast. When will they take the hint?

Jeff Geerling.

This weekend I had to buy a new dishwasher because our old GE died.

I bought a Bosch 500 series because that’s what Consumer Reports recommended, and more importantly, I could find one in stock.

After my dad and I got it installed, I went to run a rinse cycle, only to find that that, along with features like delayed start and eco mode, require an app.

Not only that, to use the app, you have to connect your dishwasher to WiFi, set up a cloud account in something called Home Connect, and then, and only then, can you start using all the features on the dishwasher.

I always check for that before buying something. I would not buy such a product. (I do have a Bosch dishwasher, because I think them one of the best brands going, but the one I have works without an app.)

The Gothamist.

As far as enduring New York City icons go, sky-high sandwiches are right up there with pizza, the Statue of Liberty, rats and Carrie Bradshaw. And right now, they’re having a major moment.

Let’s begin with the Mama’s Too Chicken Alla Vodka sandwich — arguably New York’s current social media champ in the big-sammy category — which combines cutlets, vodka sauce, pesto and burrata for a “messy and beautiful” handheld that could get you “a bit turned on.”

I’ve also seen and heard talk of the “dumb-good” Gargiulo Burger, a roast beef plus patty plus broth creation at Brennan & Carr in Sheepshead Bay that had one guy invoking the Sign of the Cross and murmuring about the “terrible things” it made him want to do.

The obvious quibble is that these aren’t ‘too big to eat’, merely ‘too big to eat at one time’. This is like the ‘giant economy size’ packages of Stuff in grocery stores—businesses like to sell in what are to them profitable quantities, so they either give you a break on the price-per-component-unit or just make the minimum size from which they can profit into the minimum size that you can buy.

Mr & Mrs Psmith’s Bookshelf:

LLMs, when working exactly as intended, enable human falsehood — because our society relies on written records as proof of work. Until recently that was fine, because writing down lies actually used to be pretty hard: putting together a convincing false report from scratch — maintenance records for the airplane you’re about to board, say, or a radiologist’s report on your brain scan — was almost as time-consuming as actually checking the things that were supposed to checked and then documenting them, and the liar had to spend the whole time aware of their own dishonesty. (Not that this stops everyone, of course.) But now that it takes about two clicks to generate an inspector’s report for the house you’re considering buying, or the pathologist’s findings in your biopsy, how much are you going to trust that they actually looked?

Politics makes for a mean game of Twister.

Read it.

For eons, Canadians have viewed Alabama as a small state that, save for a few pockets, is dirt poor. All anybody seems to know about Alabama is that Montgomery and Birmingham were the centre of the civil rights movement. In 1963, when Martin Luther King Jr. wrote his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” he called Birmingham “probably the most thoroughly segregated city in the United States.”

So, it was a shock when Canadian economist Trevor Tombe and the International Monetary Fund ran the numbers in 2023 and 2024 and concluded that Canada had, in fact, become poorer than Alabama.

Socialism will do that to you.

Read it.

China reacted with unease to the daring U.S. military raid on Iran’s nuclear facilities with official state media voicing fears that underground Chinese nuclear sites are vulnerable to similar strikes, according to a U.S. Air Force think tank report.

Yeah—sweat, you bastards. Then start playing nice.

They did, however, call you a kafir, and would like to be able to call you a dhimmi. But you have a point.

Read it.

I’d be happy to pay to read the Wall Street Journal if I could get it for 10 cents a copy, as I did in my first job in 1978, rather than paying over $500 a year for a subscription.

The Economist, a Voice of the Crust.

Just six years ago Democratic states looked like they were better at educating children than Republican ones. Their pupils scored higher on reading and maths tests. But since the pandemic students in places like Alabama, Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas have shot up the national rankings.

Gee, I wonder why? Perhaps by eliminating Woke indoctrination and actually teaching facts and skills?

Adjust the results for such things as student poverty, and the “southern surge” is even more impressive. On a ranking compiled by the Urban Institute, a think-tank, Mississippi comes top (see chart 1). Florida, Texas and Louisiana also beat Massachusetts, the state that scores best when disadvantage is not taken into account.

Notice that they can’t give you straight data; it has to be ‘adjusted’—which is how we got the Climate Change Crisis.

It helps that red states have gone back to basics: legislators in state capitals have enacted new rules that require teaching reading via phonics and holding failing schools accountable. Those decisions matter a great deal for classrooms. But America is made up of more than 13,000 school districts, most of which have the autonomy to set policy, too. That gives cities and towns across the country the opportunity to run small experiments to figure out how to get students to learn—and then to double down on what works.

And there it is. Education majors need not apply.

Read it.

France is witnessing an extraordinary religious resurgence, as record numbers of young people flock to churches for Ash Wednesday and baptism, Le Figaro highlights in a recent article.

Once considered a global bastion of secularism, the country is seeing a 17% rise in adult baptisms in Paris alone, with figures jumping over 50% in just two years. According to analysts, this spiritual awakening is largely driven by a generation searching for direction and meaning in a world dominated by “materialistic indigestion” and geopolitical instability.

Watch it.

China is doing some strange things with robots.

If I were rich, I’d hire these guys as my security team. i doubt that they would be overly troubled by Illegal Orders.

The Telegaph (UK).

On Wednesday morning, one US government official thought there was a 90 per cent chance of the US declaring war on Iran within weeks.

By Wednesday afternoon, when Donald Trump demanded Sir Keir Starmer keep hold of the Diego Garcia military base, some had upgraded it to a “99 per cent chance”.

Exactly why Mr Trump suddenly turned on the Prime Minister’s deal to hand over the Chagos Islands to Mauritius and rent back the joint US-UK base is unclear. He had issued a tepid endorsement of the agreement just two weeks ago.

But the theory spreading around Washington is that the US president’s hand was forced by the prospect of imminent war with Iran.

The Telegraph (UK).

US fighter jets tracked as heading towards the Middle East could be laying the groundwork for a major bombing campaign.

The uptick in warplanes travelling to the Gulf is likely to be used to clear the way for heavy bombers to strike at the heart of Iran’s regime, experts have said.

Large numbers of American combat aircraft and support planes such as air-to-air refuellers have been seen moving eastwards this week.

The combination of the approaching USS Gerald R Ford strike group and the USS Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier, which is already positioned in the Arabian Sea, analysts predict that Donald Trump is preparing a sustained military campaign against Iran.

The Telegraph (UK).

Naval sailors are to go on strike over pay so low that it may be in breach of minimum wage laws.

Personnel from the Royal Fleet Auxiliary (RFA) will stage a walkout in the near future following a strike vote by the Rail, Maritime and Transport (RMT) trade union.

RFA sailors crew tankers and supply ships used by the Royal Navy. The union claimed it cannot show that all its members “are even being paid at least the minimum wage for the hours they are required to work”.

The latest vote was accompanied by the claim that RFA sailors’ 12-hour working shifts at sea may not comply with minimum wage laws, which guarantee an income of £12.21 per hour for those aged 21 and over.

Lifehacker.

You don’t have to want to live forever (a la the millionaire-immortality-influencer Bryan Johnson) to want to live longer. I’ve seen a larger shift in the fitness industry lately, where a focus on “longevity” has replaced where you might have once seen the words “beach body.” All around us, the language has shifted from “get shredded” to “increase healthspan,” from “tone up” to “build bone density.” In this new era, the goal isn’t just looking good at the beach, but making sure you can still walk on that beach when you’re ninety.

On its face, this is a welcome change. I’ll always advocate for metrics of success that are less about how you look in a mirror, and more about how well your body functions across decades. At the same time, I’m skeptical of the ways “metabolic flexibility,” “muscle mass preservation,” and “inflammation control” are replacing “beach body” in the wellness lexicon. Is this truly progress in how we think about health?

Again: A fundamental reimagining of why we exercise is not altogether bad. I’m just not convinced that’s what’s happening here. Is this obsession with longevity actually in good faith? Or are we being sold the same old products and insecurities, now wrapped in shiny new scientifically sounding packaging?