Quotulatiousness

August 20, 2026

“It is not strength difference that leads schoolboy teams to regularly beat women’s national sporting teams”

Filed under: Business, Health, Sports — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

It’s a common observation that teenage boys’ teams can compete — and beat — professional or national competitive womens’ teams in many sports. I’d always assumed that greater male muscle mass and overall strength were the primary reason for this, but Lorenzo Warby points out that strength differences do not completely explain the competitive disparity:

Babylon Bee pokes fun at the US Women’s Team

Social media provides the technology to strongly increase the social signalling and the shunning and shaming that moralises disagreement in service of shared status games. To put it another way, social media upscales social/relational aggression that attacks people’s social standing on the basis of ostentatious moral or social concern.

Because believing X is such performative way of grading people, believing-X makes you a good person creates purity-spirals as people up-the-ante to make their signal — their moral piety display — more salient and reduce competition for positions. It also attracts and empowers the personality disordered — specifically Cluster B’s — as believing-X makes you a good person requires so little to join the status game and advantages those who are manipulatively unrestrained. In other words, it acts as a negative character test, that selects for people of bad moral character.

The inability to admit ever being wrong goes with the moralising of disagreement and identity-through-belief.

Social media does not enable the up-scaling of physical aggression, although it does enable the transmission of threats of such. By contrast, social media — with its electronic mobbing — is a very effective medium for emotional or relational aggression. As women, the physically weaker sex, are particularly inclined to be quite protectively self-deceptive about their own aggression — it is “just” moral or social concern — that leads to both intense aggression and denial of its existence: “there is no such thing as cancel culture”/”it is just a shift in moral, in social, concern”.

Screenshot

Social media can be particularly toxic for adolescent girls. Adolescents often lack a settled or robust sense of self, tend to be very wrapped up in how other people see them, and have a weak sense of their effect on others. All this is even more so for people-focused adolescent girls, who are both particularly prone to engage in — and be vulnerable to — emotional or relational aggression and to seek socially-protective identities. It is plausible that growing up with the excesses of social media increases support for control of speech, including making hate speech a live issue.

More things-focused boys are much more likely to retreat into playing games (both online or physical games) or some other physical activity. The greater female focus on people makes adolescent girls more vulnerable to social media-generated aggression, identity confusion and comforting cognitive refuges and conformism; the greater male focus on things creates a divergence between young male and female perspectives, aggravated by the strong female social preference for other females.

Survey of British women done for The New Statesman.

Due to strong, even at times intense, sex-differentiated selection pressures, in human evolution, human males are systematically better at forming and operating teams than women. Among women, it is the most masculinised personalities — lesbians and tomboys — who tend to be better at teams and teamwork, though they are still generally not as good at it as men.

The operating principle is that men are more likely to suppress their emotions to perform their designated role (in a team, in an organisation). Women are more likely to subordinate their designated role (in a team, in an organisation) to their emotions. Hence, for example, women and girls are more likely to be aggressive towards fellow team members during a game than are men and boys. Hence also — as we will see — male-dominated institutions have been better at catering for women and girls than female-dominated institutions have been at catering for men and boys.

It is not strength difference that leads schoolboy teams to regularly beat women’s national sporting teams. From adolescence on, boys and men are systematically stronger than girls and women of the same age: but even a fit 14 year old boy is not likely to be stronger than a fit, athletic 21 year old sportswoman. It is difference in male and female cognitive and behaviour patterns that leads to teenage boys sporting teams beating national women’s teams.

Institutions — to be functional — generally have to been scaled-up teams. That women are systematically worse at teams than men means that the feminisation of institutions and organisations tends to degrade their functionality. For example, female “emotions-as-threat” tone-policing makes it harder to generate trust, as people curate their interactions. Men and boys make outrageous jokes and rib and insult each other to test whether the others will fold under pressure. The social flattening of tone policing generates much more uncertainty, because it produces far less revealing information, so less trust.

The more differences of opinion are seen as threat, insult or moral failure, the more destructively conformist the institution or organisation is likely to be. This both acts to block feedback and enable the entrenchment of structures of conformist not-noticing.

One way out of this is to have strong standards in favour of truth and robust use of evidence. This, in turn, requires willingness to enforce such standards, which many women find emotionally confronting to do, as they are far more primed to read emotions as threat. Retreating from enforcing standards and boundaries on the grounds of being “inclusive” gives emotional — and so moral — cowardice a warm inner glow via a patina of self-righteousness. An emotionally-comforting retreat from enforcing standards then aids the entrenchment of emotionally-comforting opinion conformities.

That women tend to be self-deceptive about their own aggression — passing it off as moral or social concern — can be highly corrosive to the internal operation of an organisation or institution. In particular, it can be an effective way to block inconvenient information or concerns. All of this makes an information-restricting conformity likely to develop, and become entrenched, within an organisation as it becomes more female-dominated while making it less functional in enforcing standards, so delivering services.

Women are much less likely than men to have friends of lower socio-economic standing — as those of lower social standing are generally not a good social return on the emotional investment that female friendships are based on. Given the biological expense of human children, focusing on getting a good social return for one’s emotional investment was a successful reproductive advantage. For more team-oriented men, one never knows when someone of lower socio-economic status might be useful on your team.

Feminisation — that is, the increasing pervasiveness of more female-typical behaviour patterns — thus raises issues of weakening social solidarity. One of the striking things about contemporary Western societies is how little active concern that female university graduates show for people, including other women, of lower socio-economic status within their own societies. They have very little sense of how very different the experience of women in very different social milieus can be, and they do not socialise with such women to find out.

August 11, 2026

“Some people did some things” during the pandemic, let’s move on …

Filed under: Government, Health, Liberty, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

I noted a little while back that I was astonished how quickly the “Spanish Flu” epidemic slipped out of the historical record in the early 1920s, but having gone through the Wuhan Flu experience, I understood it far better. In the Spanish Flu era, the survivors needed to move on with their lives, while in the Covid era, a lot of people wanted to forget how they’d treated their friends, co-workers, and fellow citizens. Different motivations, but similar results. But we shouldn’t let the Covid years slip gently out of memory, because people in positions of power and journalists who should have reported honestly all elected to go full authoritarian and need to be held to account for it, as L. Wayne Mathison explains:

This was never just an American problem, and it was never just about Anthony Fauci.

Canada had its own version of the same institutional failure.

During COVID, too many journalists stopped asking hard questions and started treating government public-health messaging as settled truth. Canadians who questioned lockdowns, mandates, school closures, travel restrictions or changing mask guidance were often dismissed as ignorant, selfish, dangerous or conspiratorial.

Some people certainly did spread nonsense. That does not excuse treating every dissenting argument as misinformation.

Good journalism is supposed to challenge power, especially during an emergency when governments are exercising extraordinary power over ordinary citizens.

Instead, much of our media became emotionally invested in defending the institutions it should have been scrutinizing.

That creates a serious problem now. Admitting that governments, public-health officials or journalists got important things wrong means admitting that people were sometimes mocked, censored or socially punished for raising questions that deserved answers.

So the temptation is to defend the old narrative rather than examine the record honestly.

Canada needs a proper accounting of the pandemic response. What worked? What failed? Which restrictions produced enough benefit to justify their cost? What happened to children, small businesses, mental health, civil liberties and public trust? Where did officials communicate uncertainty honestly, and where did they pretend to know more than they actually knew?

I followed the rules. I got vaccinated. I took COVID seriously.

But I will never accept the idea that taking a virus seriously required switching off critical thought.

Science improves through questioning. Journalism exists to question authority. Democracy requires governments to justify extraordinary powers.

We should have demanded all three.

August 10, 2026

Clarkson’s Farm (and seven subsidiary businesses)

Filed under: Britain, Business, Environment, Humour, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

While I don’t watch much TV outside the NFL season, I was certainly aware of Jeremy Clarkson’s post-Top Gear/post-The Grand Tour TV show, I only started actually watching it earlier this week. And that was only because of a glowing review from The Critical Drinker. I’ve been missing a really good show, but I’ve got four-and-a-half seasons to catch up on — I’m not a binge watcher, so that’s not going to happen immediately. On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Sama Hoole points out just how tenuous a farming business can be in England nowadays and how many other businesses Clarkson has started on his farm to try to make it profitable:

Jeremy Clarkson of Clarkson’s Farm.

Jeremy Clarkson runs at least eight businesses off a thousand acres in Oxfordshire. Seven of them make money.

Count them. A farm shop. A pub. A lager brand. A bestselling book every autumn. A streaming series. A merchandise range. And now an app, built by Lisa Hogan, connecting the public to farms.

Then the eighth. Growing food.

Year one, working the ground flat out: £144. By year six, a £5,000 loss where £37,000 had been projected. This summer, two hundred of those acres grew nothing at all, because putting wheat in them was a guaranteed loss before the drill left the shed.

Every enterprise on that farm turns a profit except the farming.

The lager tells you why, and the chain of cause is on the record. Government subsidies were falling, so in 2021 he decided to brew beer from his own barley. That is the entire origin of Hawkstone. A decision taken in Whitehall turned an arable farmer into a brewer, and the beer worked.

Nothing about the grain changed. Barley sold as barley goes at whatever the buyer offers that morning. Barley in a bottle goes at the price the man who grew it decides.

That one difference is the whole business.

The pub is the same move in bricks. A derelict barn nobody had wanted since 2013, bought for reportedly under a million, now with a queue. On the menu a sausage from his own pigs costs 74p against 18p for the imported version, and he absorbs that gap on every plate. The farm shop, meanwhile, is legally barred from selling food produced more than sixteen miles away, and still cannot keep up with demand.

Now look at what the farming has behind it that yours does not. One of the best land agents in England. A farm manager who has worked that ground since he was a teenager. An agronomist. A production company covering the costs. A queue down the lane. A name that sells anything it is printed on.

It loses money anyway.

And this is the ordinary arrangement, not an eccentric one. Defra’s own figures say 72 percent of farms in England now take income from something that is not farming, and diversification accounts for 31 percent of total farm income. The government’s own Batters Review found nearly a third of British farms were loss-making outright in 2024.

Diddly Squat is simply the loudest version. The shop subsidises the field. The pub subsidises the field. The television subsidises the field.

A thousand acres of English farmland, and the one thing it cannot do is pay for itself by producing food.

August 4, 2026

China attacked the sparrows, Britain will attack the cows

Filed under: Britain, China, Environment, Food, Government, History — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

People make mistakes based on insufficient information, mistaken causes, biases, and many other distorted ways of reasoning. Governments do the same thing, but when governments screw up it’s a problem for everyone:

In 1958 the Chinese state worked out that sparrows were eating the grain, and organised six hundred million people to kill every one of them.

It did not take bullets. Villages, schools and factory units turned out with pots, pans, drums and gongs and made continuous noise so that no bird could land anywhere. Nests were pulled down, eggs smashed, chicks killed. The sparrows flew until their hearts gave out and dropped into the streets, where children collected them and the totals were reported upward as achievements. The toll ran into the hundreds of millions.

The arithmetic was sound as far as it went. A sparrow eats grain. Fewer sparrows, more grain, more people fed. Nobody in the room was wrong about what the bird took.

They were wrong about what it did.

Sparrows eat insects, in enormous quantity, and most of all in the breeding season when the chicks need protein. Take them out of a farmed landscape and the locusts and grain borers they had been holding down are handed the whole country. Which is what happened. Crop losses to insects rose sharply, and by 1960 the ornithologist Tso-hsin Cheng had made the case well enough that Mao ordered sparrows struck from the list and replaced with bed bugs.

Far too late, and never the whole cause. The famine of 1959 to 1961 was principally a policy famine, driven by collectivisation, grain requisition and the diversion of farm labour to backyard steel furnaces, and the dead are counted in tens of millions.

But the sparrow campaign is the purest thing in the episode, because it is the reasoning stripped to bone. A committee looked at a living system, isolated the one animal it could measure as a cost, and calculated the gain from removing it without ever asking what that animal was holding up.

Now look at what is being proposed for grassland.

The ruminant is measured the same way, on one ledger line, the methane it emits and the land it stands on. What is left off the ledger is everything it does. The grazing that keeps grassland grassland instead of scrub. The dung that feeds the beetles that feed the birds. The hoof that breaks the surface so seed can take. The mouth that removes the standing dead matter which otherwise cures into wildfire fuel. The manure that returns phosphorus and nitrogen to the soil so nobody has to mine it and ship it in.

Grasslands and grazing animals co-evolved over tens of millions of years. Remove the animal and you do not get the same field minus some methane. You get a different system, and it will not be the one on the spreadsheet.

The men who ordered the sparrows killed were not stupid, and they were not cruel. They had a number, and the number was correct, and they were praised for acting on it decisively. It took two years for the second half of the equation to arrive, and by then nobody could put the birds back.

We are eighteen months into the herd reduction schemes.

The grass has not sent its invoice yet.

Update, 6 August: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.

August 2, 2026

“Cash for Clunkers” – the seen and the unseen

Filed under: Economics, Environment, Government, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

French economist Frédéric Bastiat explained why the “Cash for Clunkers” program would fail … and he wrote about it more than a hundred years before it happened – “That Which is Seen, and That Which is Not Seen”. The US government publicized the “seen” … removing older cars from the roads in pursuit of lowering pollution. Nobody publicized the “unseen”, as Handre explains:

The Cash for Clunkers program, which Congress passed in June 2009 and burned through its $3 billion budget in under two months, destroyed functional wealth on a national scale, and somehow they called it “stimulus”.

The mechanics were simple: trade in a working car, receive up to $4,500 toward a new one, and watch government employees pour sodium silicate into the old engine to make it seize permanently. Around 700,000 vehicles got crushed. These were not rusted-out death traps. The eligibility rules required the trade-in to be drivable and insured. You were watching the state systematically annihilate usable capital because Keynesian demand theory told it that destruction generates recovery. Frederic Bastiat explained why this is wrong in 1850, in an essay short enough to read on your lunch break. Congress ignored it.

The ripple effect hit people the government never mentioned in its press releases. Mechanics lost repair work. Used-car dealers watched their inventory evaporate. Low-income buyers who depend on the sub-$5,000 market faced prices that jumped roughly 10% in the years after the program. Free market economists call this “seen versus unseen”. Politicians only showed you the gleaming new Chevy Malibu driving off the lot. They never showed you the single mother in Akron who needed a $3,000 Corolla and found nothing affordable left on the lot.

Even the environmental justification collapsed under basic scrutiny. A 2009 study by Resources for the Future calculated that the program cost between $237 and $365 per ton of carbon dioxide reduced. The voluntary carbon credit market at the time priced a ton around $10 to $20. The government spent up to thirty times the market rate to achieve an environmental outcome the market was already pricing far more efficiently.

This is what central planning always does. It takes your money, destroys real assets, and transfers wealth from the poor to auto manufacturers and their financiers. The program’s designers received awards. The Akron mother paid higher prices. The engines sat crushed in junkyards. Nobody in Washington answered for any of it.

August 1, 2026

Homelessness isn’t the real problem … it’s feral humans

Filed under: Health, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Many well-meaning people see “homeless” individuals on the street and think the problem is that these individuals don’t have homes. An obvious solution occurs: we’ll just give them homes so they won’t need to sleep rough on the streets. What a great idea! With the best of intentions! What could possibly go wrong?

The real problem isn’t that there aren’t enough homes … some of those “homeless” people on the street actually do have places to sleep but for one reason or another choose not to. The real problem for most of them is that they’ve gone feral:

If you give problems the wrong names, you can’t understand them.

If you can’t understand problems, you can’t fix them.

There are almost no homeless people in America. There are only feral humans.

A homeless person is someone whose distinguishing feature is not having a home. I was homeless once, for a day, when the lease on one apartment expired before the next one was cleaned, repaired, and ready.

I parked a moving van full of my worldly possessions at my university, and slept on a couch in the student commons.

That’s “homeless”.

“Feral” is when a human cannot live within society, or comply with the basic expectations required for membership.

Yes, they do not have homes.

But this is not their distinguishing feature. Because they also don’t have jobs, sanity, sobriety, manners, morals, or hygiene.

Which is why they do not have homes.

If you give them a house, because you think they are “homeless” rather than “feral”, then they will simply repeat, within that structure, the same feral behavior.

And soon that structure will be uninhabitable.

Which, for certain people, is the whole point.

A man whose job is to sell 3d printed houses isn’t trying to fix the feral-human problem. He’s trying to sell 3d printed houses.

And it’s one hell of a lot easier to sell them to bureaucrats who aren’t spending their own personal money.

It doesn’t matter if 3d printed houses suck to live in. It doesn’t matter if the feral humans trash them. Nobody in this equation cares about the feral humans, even the feral humans themselves.

And nobody in this equation cares about the taxpayers. If the feral humans are still feral, then the 3d house grifters can sell more gimmick houses, and the bureaucrats can spend more of someone else’s money.

If a violent political upheaval becomes necessary, this will be very unpleasant for everyone involved, but at least afterwards, we will all be able to use the feral humans, bureaucrats, and grifters to fertilize the garden of new homes.

Which will be made out of bricks.

Update, 2 August: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.

July 29, 2026

Britain’s new PM is yet another Net Zero fanatic

Filed under: Britain, Environment, Government, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

At The Daily Sceptic, Chris Morrison points out that moving from Manchester to Downing Street has not changed Prime Minister Andy Burnham’s devotion to the climate change agenda and Net Zero fanaticism:

Prime Minister Andy Burnham’s official MP portrait, July 2026.
© House of Commons via Wikimedia Commons.

Praise the Lord, a Saviour from the North walks amongst us. The UK’s new Prime Minister Andy Burnham has apparently hinted that a tad more oil and gas might be taken from Britain’s remaining treasure trove lying undisturbed in the North Sea. Is this a push back on fanatical Net Zero treason as some commentators have suggested? Probably not. As always there is no need for conspiracy theories – just look at what they supported and said in the past. The new Energy Secretary Miatta Fahnbulleh is a green blob-funded whack job straight out of central climate casting, while the new tee-shirt wearing top dog is all signed up to the evil, society-destroying Climate and Nature (CAN) Bill.

It didn’t take long for the bill promoter Zero Hour (ka-ching, Green Blob money) to list the new Prime Minister as one of 193 MPs who support the proposed private member’s CAN legislation that will cut the country’s entire use of hydrocarbons – domestic and overseas – to just 10% within 10 years. Zero Hour notes of Burnham: “In 2024, as Mayor of Greater Manchester, he backed the Climate and Nature Bill because he recognised that Britain needed bold, science-led action to tackle the climate and nature crisis”.

Other more accurate interpretations are available along the lines that the bill is an abominable neo-Marxist Trojan horse that would lead to mass starvation, death and almost immediate industrial and societal collapse. With little or no hydrocarbons available from any source, food supplies would be cut in half due to a lack of fertiliser, while most medicines would be unavailable. In the regular periods of wind and solar drought, particularly in the winter, thousands would die in their blacked-out and unheated homes. Thankfully, the bill failed in the House of Commons when it was debated last year, but a terrifying 200 MPs agreed with its vile contents. Over 90 Labour MPs, all the Greens and LibDems plus two crackpot Tories said they supported the bill.

We can but pray that the two unhinged Tories, Sir Roger Gale and Simon Hoare, are currently receiving sympathetic re-education treatment as the Kemi Badenoch-led Conservative party now rushes towards the Net Zero exit. Similar classes of course are required for wayward Tories who believe that men can become women, and open borders lead to civilisation contentment.

Just three reasons come to mind to explain the heavy support for the House of Commons horror show.

  1. Rank stupidity: If the IQ score of any supporter was much lower, steps might have to be taken to ensure regular watering.
  2. Blinding ignorance: Five decades of dumbed-down education must take some blame, but the inability not to use at least one critical-thinking brain cell is worrying.
  3. Tunnel-vision zealotry: Overwhelming desire to re-order society along State-controlling communist lines – and if the majority kulaks get it, too bad. Inventing a climate crisis without a scintilla of conclusive proof is justified to create an equal, virtuous, brave new post-truth world.

Of course, allowing the two North Sea fields Rosebank and Jackdaw to open is little more than re-arranging the deckchairs on the Net Zero Ship of Fools. Thanks to the 2008 Climate Change Act and later amendments made by the Conservative Prime Minister Theresa May, Britain is legally committed to short-order Net Zero destruction. Unless the legislation is torn up, new drilling is likely to be challenged in the courts. As 2050 looms closer, lawfare will likely stop almost all new projects where emissions are likely to arise from using hydrocarbons.

The small Burnham North Sea relaxation, along with the removal of 5% VAT on electricity bills, is an obvious electoral ploy to disguise the fact that Britain now has some of the highest energy costs in the industrial world – and they are likely to get a great deal higher in the future.

July 27, 2026

Biosphere 2

Filed under: Environment, Food, Health, Science, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Sama Hoole on a now-obscure experiment in the early 1990s which didn’t produce the expected results at all:

Eight people sealed themselves in a glass dome to prove humanity could feed itself on plants, and spent two years starving in front of the world’s press.

Biosphere 2 cost a hundred and fifty million dollars. Three acres of Arizona desert under sealed glass, eight crew, door shut on 26 September 1991, nothing in or out for two years. The farm inside was worked intensively and by any agronomic measure it was superb, out-producing the most efficient smallholder farming on earth by a wide margin.

It produced 83 per cent of what they needed.

Which left Roy Walford, the crew doctor, in a sealed box with seven hungry colleagues and his own life’s work. Walford was a UCLA pathologist who had spent thirty years arguing that severe calorie restriction extends lifespan. He had doubled it in mice. And here was reality handing him his own hypothesis with the door welded shut.

So he called it a health programme.

The menu became vegetables, half a glass of goat’s milk a day, and meat or fish about once a week. The men lost close to a fifth of their body weight, the women about a tenth. And the markers Walford cared about behaved impeccably: blood pressure, glucose, cholesterol and triglycerides all down at least twenty per cent, into ranges any doctor would frame. He published it in PNAS in 1992.

The bloodwork was magnificent. The people were falling apart.

Jane Poynter wrote the book afterwards. Fatigue, depression, mental fog, and a preoccupation with food that ate the entire interior life of the crew. They stole from each other. They split into two factions that stopped speaking. The ecological research the building had been constructed for was largely abandoned by people who no longer had the headroom for anything past the next meal. The ants and cockroaches, by contrast, were thriving.

The air was leaving too. Oxygen started at 20.9 per cent and kept dropping and nobody knew where it was going. Columbia eventually worked it out: the concrete was quietly eating it. So oxygen had to be pumped in from outside, which is an interesting result for a sealed world.

Walford’s verdict on the mutiny is the whole thing in one sentence. He said afterwards that any other physician aboard would have panicked and declared they were starving, but that he knew they were on a programme of health enhancement.

He knew. Seven other people, visibly wasting, were simply mistaken.

He came out in 1993, developed ALS, blamed the conditions inside, and died in 2004 aged 79 after years on 1,600 calories a day in pursuit of a longer life. The mice got double. He did not make it to average for an American professor.

Every argument you have heard this decade was already in that building. Grow it locally. Take the animals out. Eat less. Watch the numbers improve.

Eight of the most motivated humans alive, handed three acres of the best-managed farmland on the planet and no meat, could not feed themselves.

The press reported the fighting as a personality clash.

And he updated:

I left something out of that one.

Biosphere 2 had a working farm, and the farm had pigs, chickens and goats. Only one of those three was still alive when the door opened, and the reason why is the most useful thing the entire two years produced.

    Biosphere 2 had livestock, and the crew ate the pigs first.

    Zazu and Quincy were Ossabaw dwarf pigs. In the first year one of them produced a litter of seven, which inside a sealed glass building where every calorie was counted should have been the best news anybody had.

    They killed them anyway.

    The chickens went too. Mrs Fruitcake and the rest, slaughtered because they were eating more than they were laying.

    Neither animal was killed for meat. They were killed for competing.

    A pig and a chicken have one stomach, and it wants exactly what a human wants: grain, roots, beans, anything starchy or dense. Inside Biosphere 2 there was no outside, no feed lorry, no surplus. Every mouthful a pig took came off the plate of one of eight visibly starving people. The crew did the arithmetic and reached for the knife.

    Now notice which animals survived the cull.

    The goats. Milky Way, Stardust and Vision, three African pygmy goats, milked daily for the full two years. And in the crew’s own scientific write-up, published in Advances in Space Research in 1995, they recorded that the goats were the most productive domestic animals in the entire system.

    The most productive thing in a building where the humans lost a fifth of their body weight was the ruminant.

    It is the four stomachs. A goat is a fermentation vat on legs. She runs on stalks, leaves and crop residue, the fibrous rubbish that comes off any farm and that no human gut can process, and turns it into milk. She was never taking food off the crew. She was manufacturing food out of what the crew threw away.

    So that sealed box did test the great modern argument, the one about feeding crops to animals being a waste of land and calories.

    It found the argument correct for pigs and chickens.

    It found it wrong for the animal that eats grass.

    Biosphere 2 gets quoted endlessly as proof we should grow plants and drop the livestock. Eight people with the most productive farmland on earth ran that experiment properly, went hungry for two years, and kept exactly one kind of animal alive throughout, because she was the only one paying rent.

    They killed the pigs to feed the people and kept the goat to feed the people.

July 25, 2026

QotD: “… the major evolutionary pressure is other humans”

Filed under: History, Humour, Quotations, Science — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

One of the grand joys of being ignorant on a subject is that it’s possible to project one’s own insistences onto the findings of others. This explains Gazza on wealth, Sir Lenworth on reparations and Spud on any aspect of economics. Given the fun they’re having why not partake?

    The Reich Lab article on genetic selection in Europe over the last 10,000 years is finally online, and it includes such interesting results as:

    — Intelligence has increased

    — People got lighter

    — Mental disorders became less common

Clearly, given Gazza, Sir Lenworth and Spud less common is not a synonym for does not happen. But to proceed to my own ignorance:

    In a sort-of confirmation of the Cochran-Harpending thesis, they also found that, for several traits, the intensity of selection appears higher more recently in time.

    Specifically, selection intensity increased in the Bronze Age compared to the Neolithic, then it stabilized!

At which point I get to project my own mental wibbles onto the results of others.

Now, think of that deep history. Up until agriculture — roughly that Bronze Age — the driver of human evolution was the wolves trying to eat us. OK, mebbe the staphilococci, the crocs, hippoes, Venus Human Traps and so on. We were, as with most species, not really competing against ourselves but against those who saw us as either food or as competitors for an ecological niche.

Yes, yes, I know, this isn’t true but it’s a reasonable pencil sketch start to an argument.

OK, so now Bronze Age. We’ve got agriculture. We also, at this exact same time, see human populations change quite a lot. There’s a massive expansion of certain Y chromosomes and much less of maternal mitochondria. You know, the blokes from over the hill come in, kill all the men and shag the birds. We’ve — perhaps through agriculture, perhaps through bronze, perhaps through the simple absence of any more terra nullius — made the major threat to human other humans.

Or, of course, given the genetics here we could say that the major threat to male humans is now other male humans but that doesn’t make much difference to the argument — men, after all, the only ones who ever do anything.

Well, if the major threat is now humans then that means that the major evolutionary pressure is other humans. And they’re fighting with the same weapons we are. Same basic DNA possibilities, roughly the same physique, about the same IQ and on and on. This is going to have much more pressure on that evolution than being chased by a hippo is — that’s a one time win or lose event. Whether your genes persist is now a permanent battle with others who share near all of your capabilities. The importance being that word “near”.

Yes, I do know that it’s possible to make much the same argument for any species and their access to breeding. But the thing we’re interested in explaining here is why did this speed up in humans at one point? I claim that’s it’s because of the above — the rough settlement of decent agricultural land, worldwide, (or in the case here, in Europe. This doesn’t apply to Wales, say, or Scotland, which explains both of them now neatly) means that the competitor is other humans, not the more general environment. We’ve changed the evolutionary pressure. We’re no longer trying to outhink a pig — something Gazza, Spud etc often don’t — but that other bastard with his eye on our field and our wife.

So, that’s the thing. Human evolution sped up because it was the other bastard humans we were competing with, not the general environment. QED, I’m right and go boil your heads.

Tim Worstall, “Human Beings Were The Enemy In Human Evolution”, It’s all obvious or trivial except …, 2026-04-24.

July 22, 2026

Sensible climate spending

Filed under: Environment, Government, Politics, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 05:00

On his Substack, John Robson suggests some spending on environmental issues where we actually can make positive changes as opposed to the spending on climate change which is mostly wasted:

As noted in our latest Green Money Machine, there’s no question that humanity faces real environmental problems and that some worthwhile organizations and people are trying to do something about them. It’s an important reason why we oppose, and even resent, the way the overwhelming focus on “climate change” drains off so much effort, time, and even money. So let us tell you about some actual environmental issues that have caught our attention lately. For instance “the Mediterranean Sea’s critically endangered population of great white sharks”. Of course we also recognize that some ecologists may be taking a worldly, not to say cynical, approach and leveraging concern about climate to raise money for other actually more useful activities. But in the long run cunning isn’t a good plan any more than obtuseness is.

When it comes to great white sharks it is also of course easy to imagine that anyone planning to swim in the Mediterranean might regard their scarcity as a plus. But the fact that such a comment would be controversial today reminds us of just how far the environmental movement has come since the 1960s, and frequently in good ways.

Indeed, being historically minded, we even recall a jibe by the New York Times after US president Franklin Roosevelt’s crushing 1936 reelection victory (he won every state but Maine and Vermont) that “If he were to say a kind word for the man-eating shark, people would look thoughtful and say perhaps there are two sides to the question”. But just in case you were frightened by Jaws in your youth, we could also mention (also from National Geographic) efforts to save the Mekong River’s “megafish”, a catfish bigger than a person that … no, wait. Poor choice. Also scary.

Satellite photo of the Great Salt Lake from August 2018 after years of drought, reaching near-record lows. The difference in colors between the northern and southern portions of the lake is the result of the Lucin Cutoff, a railroad causeway. The image was acquired by the MSI sensor on the Sentinel-2B satellite (Resolution: 20m, RGB Composites: True color, Band 4-3-2).
Wikimedia Commons

OK then. How about the shrinking Great Salt Lake? Because according to National Geographic (yes again they do serve a useful purpose when not banging on about climate):

    Since 1850, the lake has lost 73 percent of its water and 60 percent of its surface area, and as more people move to the region, the water that typically feeds the lake is increasingly being diverted for agricultural, municipal, and industrial needs. What’s more, over the past few decades, a series of challenges – including climate change and the worst megadrought in at least 1,200 years – has impacted the cyclical climatic conditions that have sustained the lake for millennia.

Aaaargh. Banging on about climate. It’s a hard habit to break. And a bad one to keep, because it’s ridiculous to describe the loss of water going back to 1850, attribute it to human folly diverting the flow, and throw in the worst megadrought in at least 1,200 years (which necessarily means there was a horrific one 1,200 years ago which can’t have been our fault) and then toss in “climate change” which again is a description of alterations in weather not a causal force, and then speak of all these things having “impacted the cyclical climatic conditions that have sustained the lake for millennia”.

Bosh. In the first place, they cannot possibly know what cyclical climate conditions were like thousands and thousands of years ago. Nor what kind of pattern of megadroughts occurring millennia apart is natural, especially since interglacials don’t last that many millennia. Second, it isn’t possible that diverting water to agriculture, or swimming pools, has disrupted climate cycles. It just isn’t. Critical thought seems to be among the first and worst victims of “climate change”. The mind virus not the weather thing.

Especially as we regard it as intensely desirable that our fellow human fools stop draining the lake. Really. Take some of the tens of billions governments squander on trying to fix the weather, which honestly has always been bad, frequently dreadful, and put it to sensible uses.

July 20, 2026

Markets reject Carney’s official carbon price, so Canadians have to pay more

Filed under: Books, Business, Cancon, Economics, Environment, Government — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Canada is one of the last remaining bastions of Net Zero zealotry … in fact, Prime Minister Mark Carney may be the only national leader trying to turn back the tide of economic reality over this:

AI image posted by L. Wayne Mathison on X.

Mark Carney wrote a book called Value(s) lecturing the world about fairness, responsibility, sustainability and humility. His real governing value appears to be this: when markets reject his climate scheme, force Canadians to rescue it.

Carney now admits the official carbon price is supposedly above $100 while actual credits have traded near $20. Any honest banker would recognize the message. The market does not believe these credits are worth the imaginary price politicians assigned to them.

Carney’s response is classic central-planner arrogance. He will not reconsider the product. He will rig the price, tighten the rules, compel companies to buy it and call the resulting coercion “investment certainty”.

He praised carbon pricing in Value(s) as one of the most important and effective ways to reduce emissions. Then the consumer carbon tax became politically poisonous, so he scrapped it. The industrial version survives because its costs are easier to bury inside electricity, transportation, groceries, construction materials, wages and lost investment.

Carney also boasts that Canada continues sending climate-finance money abroad while other G7 governments pull back. Canadian families are struggling with food, housing and energy, yet our philosopher-banker remains determined to finance his international reputation with their money.

His book preached humility. His government practises price fixing.

His book preached responsibility. His government transfers the risk to taxpayers.

His book preached fairness. His policies protect the climate-finance class while ordinary Canadians absorb the costs.

Carney spent years wrapping political ideology in the language of banking. Now the numbers are exposing the sales pitch. When a theoretical $100 asset trades for $20, the market has delivered its verdict. Ottawa can falsify the price, but it cannot manufacture genuine value.

Value(s) may be hundreds of pages long. Carney’s philosophy fits into one sentence:

When reality refuses to validate the climate fantasy, force Canadians to pay until it does.

July 17, 2026

Why solar power is not the answer for Britain

Filed under: Britain, Economics, Environment, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Sama Hoole looks at a recent World Bank report that shows very clearly why solar power should not even be on the power options list for Britain:

The World Bank ranked every country on earth for practical solar potential.

Britain came second from bottom. Not second from bottom in Europe. On the planet. Out of everywhere they measured, the only place with worse conditions for a solar panel is Ireland. Norway is above us. Norway, where the sun clocks off entirely for part of the year, is a better bet than Lincolnshire.

The reasons are not a mystery. We sit at 53 degrees north, the same line as Edmonton, Alberta. The sun in December gets about as high as a first-floor window and then thinks better of it. And there’s the cloud, which is not a detail, it is the national personality. A square metre of London gets 0.52 kilowatt hours of sunlight a day in December and 4.74 in July, so the panel does nine times less work in the month your heating is on than in the month it isn’t. Across the whole of 2024, British solar ran at 9.5% of what it’s rated at. The other 90.5% is a photograph of a power station.

Now the other column.

The ground we’re bolting it to is Trent valley silt and Lincolnshire fen. Some of it took three hundred years to drain. It grows wheat at yields that most of the planet cannot get near, in a climate so reliably damp that grass grows here without anyone asking it to, which is the entire reason this island has cattle and cheese and a butcher.

So we are, measurably, one of the worst places on earth for sunlight and one of the best on earth for food.

And we’ve had a good long look at both of those numbers and gone with sunlight.

Somewhere in Namibia, which the same report ranked first, there is a patch of absolutely nothing, in full sun, wondering what it did wrong.

July 16, 2026

“Only fans – Europe’s approach to air conditioning”

Filed under: Economics, Environment, Europe, Government, Health, History, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

From the free-to-cheapskates portion of Ed West‘s most recent article on his Substack:

The EU may not actually believe this, but they thought you would …

Different climates have enjoyed advantages at different points in time. For most of history, industry and scholarship in southern Europe benefitted from significantly longer hours of sun and daylight much of the year compared to the north, allowing for more hours of work and study. James Belich noted in The World the Plague Made that this all changed with the expansion of the Basque whaling trade in the late medieval period, providing cheap wax for candles.

England and the Netherlands subsequently overtook the south in their levels of literacy, a transformation usually attributed to Protestantism, although this technical solution to a physical disadvantage certainly helped. As the northern countries grew richer, and were able to use more energy, so the climate came to be an advantage. Cooler areas of Europe in particular benefitted from a relative absence of vector-borne disease, dangerous insects and food poisoning, which made hotter regions of the world more lethal.

Yet the biggest curse of the lower latitudes is that heat makes us sluggish — since people struggle to work above 23° centigrade. As Maarten Boudry writes on his substack, “For every degree above 25°C (77°F), our cognitive performance declines by around two percent. And if synapses suffer, so does economic activity. At 30°C, office performance drops by almost 9 percent.”

I see that. I’ve been trying to write this in temperatures of up to 34°, which equates to a production level similar to a moderate hangover. If only there was some sort of technology that could make my home cooler.

Until relatively recently the world was dominated by a handful of relatively cold regions, and Paul Johnson observed in his history of the United States that human industry thrives in what Fahrenheit appreciators would call “the 60s”, a Goldilocks zone that turned New England and Greater Yankeedom into a powerhouse. The southern states, in contrast, were held back by higher mortality and the impossibility of productive work in the sweltering summer months, and until the mid-20th century were about 40 per cent poorer than the Union states.

The northerners were especially known for their work ethic and their inventiveness, a characteristic epitomised by the Boston-born Benjamin Franklin. Then in 1902, New York’s Willis Carrier changed everything with the one of the most world-changing inventions, the air conditioning unit; aircon has notably shifted population and power in the US southwards, but Dixieland is just part of a broader, global “sunshine belt”.

Among the most notable beneficiaries of this technology are the financial powerhouses of Dubai and Singapore. Lee Kuan Yew famously said of air conditioning that it was “perhaps one of the signal inventions of history. It changed the nature of civilization by making development possible in the tropics … The first thing I did upon becoming prime minister was to install air conditioners in buildings where the civil service worked.” Indeed, it has often been noted as characteristic of the city-state that the aircon is usually set to icy levels, reflecting their determination to be on work mode throughout the day.

While Singapore is the most famous beneficiary of Carrier’s invention, Japan has almost universal air conditioning, with 91 per cent of homes equipped, compared to 88 per cent in the US. China is home to more than 500 million aircon units, is the world’s largest manufacturer, and has also seen an economic shift towards the south. Vietnam, also likely to be a major economic power by mid-century, is as dependent on this technology as it is on its people’s ingenuity. The development of aircon, and medical breakthroughs in the treatment of tropical diseases, has shifted the centre of gravity away from the cold regions of the earth — just as the globe is warming up.

This year’s European heat wave, still ongoing, saw temperatures reach 37 last month in England, a June record. Many schools shut early, although one in Kent instead used air raid tunnels to teach children. London’s Central Line hit 39.4c, presenting a real risk of heat stroke.

Across Europe the hot weather has closed down not just schools but factories, offices and rail lines, and led to an estimated 10,000 deaths, with France top of the heat mortality charts. Indeed as Boudry writes, Europe has the worst heat-related excess deaths of any region — while fatalities in the US have declined by 75 per cent since the adoption of air conditioning.

Update, 17 July: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.

July 13, 2026

QotD: They took away recess – and then wondered why boys struggled

Filed under: Education, Health, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

For years, schools have acted as though more learning comes from more sitting, more compliance, more desk time, and more control.

But children do not learn best by being treated like machines.

And boys, especially, often do not thrive when movement, noise, spontaneity, and unstructured play are stripped from the school day.

One of the revealing things about modern education is how casually it has pushed recess aside. What was once understood as a normal and necessary part of childhood is now often treated as expendable — a frill, a reward, or a distraction from the “real work” of school. But the research points in the opposite direction. Recent reviews continue to find that recess is associated with academic and cognitive benefits, behavioral and emotional benefits, physical benefits, and social benefits. The strongest modern claim is not that recess is a magic cure for every school problem, but that it helps children function better and does so without harming academic achievement.

That matters for all children.

But it matters in a special way for boys.

Not because girls do not need recess. They do. But many boys are more movement-driven, more physically expressive, and more likely to regulate themselves through action. A school culture built around prolonged stillness can turn normal boyhood into a problem to be managed. Then, when boys struggle under those conditions, the system acts as though the flaw lies in the boy rather than in the environment. Recent research continues to find sex differences in recess physical activity, with boys on average being more physically active during recess than girls.

Tom Golden, “They Took Away Recess – And Then Wondered Why Boys Struggled”, Men Are Good, 2026-04-06.

July 9, 2026

Here’s why “free range children” went away

Filed under: Britain, Cancon, Health, History, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

As a child in England and then in Canada, I had a pretty wide range for unsupervised activities and I generally took advantage of that. On foot or riding my bicycle, it was completely normal for me to be several miles from home on any given day. I’ve posted this image a few times, showing the “free range” diminishing generation by generation for an English family, and it’s mostly true here in Canada and in the United States as well:

Graphic showing the diminishing “free ranges” of each generation of an English family.

At Classical Ideals, Megha Lillywhite discusses the “political extremism” involved today in trying to raise your children:

One of the most fundamental things that children require in order to grow up healthy, strong, wise and good, is a lot of time outdoors and in public spaces. Yet what we see from more traditional families in the west, as well as from extremely wealthy families, is that they are holding their children closer than ever, and enclosing them in increasingly smaller and more carefully selected bubbles of protection.

This is because “the outdoors” and “public life” is territory that has increasingly been ceded by western society to violent criminals, the mentally ill, and drug addicts. Parenting, for those who are vigilant to the threats, can no longer be “laissez-faire” and it has become less about choosing the ideal, and more about choosing the least damaging option.

But what has been lost? And what must be reclaimed for those of us with power and spirit to have any kind of meaningful victory in this world?

Most leftists see politics through the framework of wanting to be “a good person” as it is defined by their peer group and ideology. The ordinary person, on the other hand, views politics through the set of decisions that would best protect their children and give them the best chance at a good life.

Why is this? Leftists either don’t have children, or they have children but live in gilded cages and are therefore untouched (yet) by the consequences of their ideological beliefs.

Children must exist as part of a broader community in order to develop healthily. They must be able to go to a public library, the local shop, ride their bikes to the park, take the city bus or walk to their grandmother’s house on their own. They must be able to play outside unsupervised for hours on end in their neighbourhoods.

[…]

But some measure of freedom is also necessary for children to develop a healthy psyche. A child who can go to the shop and pay for milk on his own and bring it home will develop not only a sense of responsibility, but will feel confident in his ability to do useful things. A child who can visit his friends and relatives on his own will develop social skills and a sense of belonging. A child who can go to the library on his own can begin the lifelong journey of guiding his own learning.

[…]

In a 2007 study done in Sheffield, UK by Dr. William Bird, he found that children in 1926 were allowed to roam up to six miles away from home unsupervised and by 2000, that number dropped to 300 metres. The major drop off happened around 1979 which is coincidentally the time when mass migration began in the United Kingdom and demographics of towns like Sheffield began to seriously shift. In the recent “Rape Gang Inquiry” released by the Restore Party of Britain, the report which details three decades of kidnap, rape and murder of a quarter of a million British girls which would have began around this time. So English parents restricting their children’s freedoms around this time period was not something hysterical or unfounded.

We must be politically courageous in order to admit what is required to maintain that kind of a world. Stated simply, a safe, healthy and good childhood requires a fundamental rejection of leftist “empathy” politics. There is one incident in particular that can help to describe how this system functions today.

Link from John Carter on Substack Notes, who commented:

The same shift towards a confined, highly monitored childhood took place in the US, corresponding to the great suburbanization. The suburbs grew due to white flight from the cities, following their colonization by blacks and the de facto ban on community defence enforced by the civil rights act.

Suburban municipal architecture is largely comprised of informal defensive barriers that prevent undesirable elements from penetrating the neighborhoods undetected.

This enables middle class parents to deniably insulate their children from the worst consequences of diversity, but at the cost of raising their children in open air prisons, in a stifling social atmosphere characterized primarily by a brittle insistence upon euphemistic avoidance of direct acknowledgement of the real issues. “Racism is simply terrible! We just wanted to live somewhere with good schools.”

Children brought up amidst the tedious fakery of the suburbs naturally become attuned to the pervasive hypocrisy of suburban white culture. They have to: simply navigating this culture requires the ability to understand the unsaid, while pretending that one has not understood it. Combined with the open air prison environment inhibiting emotional development, this is a powerful recipe for induced neurosis.

There are only a few possible outcomes: 1) they become cowardly hypocrites themselves; 2) they reject the hypocrisy and become fanatical anti-white race communists; 3) they reject the hypocrisy and become fascists.

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