Quotulatiousness

October 25, 2026

Penguins, man

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

Penguins may be the reason we can’t have nice things … or they would be if they hadn’t gone extinct. You didn’t hear that? That’s because it didn’t happen, like so many events predicted by climate scientists over the last few decades. John Robson has the details:

Emperor Penguins on Snow Hill Island, Antarctica.
Photo by Ian Duffy via Wikimedia Commons.

We read in Phys.org that “Penguin poop is melting Antarctic snow by keeping algae green”. And of course we ask: Haven’t penguins lived there for millions of years? Answer: yes. Penguins evolved some 60 million years ago but Antarctica has only had significant ice coverage for 34 million. Yet they never kept it green, or turned it green, despite their predilection for dramatic defecation, until we invented climate. A story that caught our eye not just for the notion that a long-standing natural process could suddenly transform a continent but because we’d just also been told by National Geographic that climate change is driving penguins to extinction. But climate science is not like other kinds.

Despite waddling around looking comically unfit to survive in nature red in tooth and claw, penguins, with the very cool scientific name Sphenisciformes, actually flourish from the equator to the South Pole, with larger and thus better-insulated ones obviously being more common where it’s colder. It’s all part of the marvel of nature, including that having first developed the power of flight, which seems to us terrestrials like the A1 supreme deluxe way of avoiding being eaten, getting to food fast etc., some birds then chucked it to go back to running around but with fewer legs, like ostriches and emus but also kiwis and, in the good old terrifying days, the “terror birds” who ran up to 30 mph, stood up to 9 feet tall and “ripped the flesh from the body of other animals” and whose very name “Phorusrhacidae” is already frightening.

Others even decided running was also not for the birds, and walking was barely tolerable, so they jumped back into the water from which their ancestors had emerged during the Devonian. And it worked. Indeed, speaking of penguins’ evolution, Wikipedia adds that:

    There was a great diversity of species in subantarctic regions, and at least one giant species in a region around 2,000 km south of the equator 35 mya, during the Late Eocene, a climate decidedly warmer than today.

Warmer than today? Say it ain’t so! But it is. And a giant penguin, due to the fact that life likes warmth and struggles in cold. (There’s a reason Emperor Penguins are as lonely as they are hardy.) Now however we are doing them in. The NG article starts:

    In the storm-driven wilderness between South America’s southern cape and the frozen boundary of mainland Antarctica, the South Sandwich Islands form an isolated, crescent-shaped archipelago of rock and ice. Its rugged, northernmost isle, Zavodovski Island – where chinstraps and macaroni penguins blanket the hillsides that surround an active volcano – has held the title of the largest penguin colony on Earth.

And we know what you’re thinking. If the place is bristling with penguins, they must have pooped away the snow long ago. Unless they all died, which apparently they did:

    as chinstrap penguins began facing steep decline across the Antarctic Peninsula starting in the 1980, scientists wondered whether this remote island was faring any better. Through an analysis combining aerial drone surveys and manual population counts, researchers from the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) have discovered that in fewer than fifteen years, the island’s chinstrap population has plummeted by 63 percent – a loss of over half a million penguins.

And not for climate biologists the boom-and-bust cycle we learned about back in ye day in high school biology. Heck no:

    Their findings, published today in the journal Current Biology, identifies the island as home to the fastest-declining chinstrap population in the world, with climate-driven losses documented continuously since 2011. The decline wipes out more than a quarter of the total penguin population on Zavodovski, ceding the island’s title of world’s largest penguin colony to Cape Adare in Antarctica’s Ross Sea.

Note the phrase “climate-driven losses”. Since we don’t know what climate is driving or how it’s untestable. But it’s taking us with the penguins:

    The Southern Ocean is no stranger to loss. This news comes just six months after Emperor penguins and Antarctic fur seals were officially declared endangered with declining sea ice levels cited as a leading culprit. Acting as the planet’s primary climate buffer, the Southern Ocean absorbs nearly three-quarters of global ocean warming and a fifth of man-made carbon.

Again, how you’d test any of those assertions is anyone’s guess, though whether they’re going to ask for and get grants to test them is a certain no.

Come to think of it, we’ve discussed the plight of the Emperor Penguin before. Even if you don’t read the old post, I do encourage you to watch the embedded video.

QotD: Feminism as a luxury belief

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

One ideology where it’s as true as it is for libertarianism is feminism. Feminism was led by (and greatly improved the life chances of) women like me. It was great for smart, disagreeable, career-focussed women who don’t like or want kids. And yes, just like getting banged up for a bit of weed while harming precisely no-one seriously annoys the kind of smart, self-controlled person who can formulate a (libertarian) policy response to the War on Drugs, so too with women who were uninterested in home and family (or who were same-sex attracted) and found that being circumscribed professionally and romantically really, really rankled.

However, just as most people aren’t members of Heath’s self-control aristocracy, most women do not combine high intellect with disagreeableness and conscientiousness. Some feminists have realised this — albeit in an ad hoc way — and because feminism as a wider movement was/is wedded to blank-slatism, they believed they could shift the dial on what was then called “female socialisation”. That is, they thought it would be possible to make women as a group more closely resemble the able, disagreeable women who were by the 70s and 80s entering the professions, politics, academia, lobbying outfits, and think-tanks.

Or, of course, men. Men more often combine high trait disagreeableness with high trait conscientiousness (although even among males, the combination is rare). This is despite the fact that there are more agreeable women than agreeable men, and more conscientious women than conscientious men.

    No woman should be authorized to stay at home to raise her children. Society should be totally different. Women should not have that choice, precisely because if there is such a choice, too many women will make that one. It is a way of forcing women in a certain direction.

    “A Dialogue with Simone de Beauvoir”, in Betty Friedan, It Changed My Life: Writings on the Women’s Movement, Random House, 1976, p. 397.

de Beauvoir’s suggestion is both authoritarian and hilarious, and represents a panicked response — not unlike the howls from Marxists when it became clear the proletariat was uninterested in revolution — to women unlike her. While it’s true (at least historically) that there were a number of strands to feminism — including a pro-motherhood one — careerist feminism finished up dominating all the others. I’m old enough to remember campaigns for wages for housework. If some old school wonks got hold of this idea, it could form part of a suite of policies directed to increasing the fertility rate.

You don’t see those feminist campaigns any more, though. They’ve been submarined. As I say, I’m old.

Women throughout the developed world — notoriously — tell pollsters they want more children than they have. Usually three is the preferred number, as opposed to two or one. The so-called “gender wage gap” exists because women have children.

Economists often decry this finding as a case of stated versus revealed preferences: what people do is more salient than what they say, something known since Roman times. Hence the Stoic quip acta non verba (“deeds not words”). However, even if fully half the “I want more kids than I have” response served up to pollsters is nothing more than windy stated preferences, that still leaves a lot of unborn but wanted children. Feminism, as Louise Perry is fond of pointing out, has simply dropped the ball on this one.

This insight is, I recognise, a genuine example of ad hominem. It suggests that people plump for ideologies that will give them a leg-up, and do so deliberately. That said, political ideology is, like conscientiousness, heritable. Henderson’s and Heath’s insight reminds us that everything social is emergent from the biological (the basis of Lorenzo Warby’s essays on this Substack). That’s why libertarianism is the way it is, and feminism is, and probably other ideologies too.

Helen Dale, “People Unlike Me”, Not On Your Team, But Always Fair, 2024-05-29.

October 24, 2026

The classic communist mistake: measuring quantity instead of value

Filed under: Environment, Europe, Government, Technology — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Denmark invested heavily in wind power, on the assumption that they could generate enough electricity from their vast wind farms on the North Sea coast to replace other forms of generation. As Bjorn Lomborg points out, it’s not adding up the way the Danes hoped it would:

Denmark spent decades building nearly 5,000 wind turbines

Together, they produced 21.6 TWh in the last 12 months

One nuclear plant in Sweden made 23.3 TWh

Oh, and nuclear runs 24/7 — wind doesn’t

There’s one big reason Denmark has some of the most expensive electricity in the world

https://transparency.entsoe.eu/generation/actual/perUnit

https://api.energidataservice.dk/dataset/ProductionConsumptionSettlement

https://eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.php?t=epmt_1_01

https://iaea.org/publications/16059

Krzysztof Szczawinski explains the mistake is the same one that Soviet bureaucrats made repeatedly:

Counting terawatt-hours is the classic communist mistake: measuring quantity instead of value.

The Soviet Union produced record tonnes of steel nobody needed and millions of left shoes. There’s an old Soviet joke: when the nail factory’s quota was set by weight, it produced one giant nail. When it was set by number, it produced millions of tiny useless ones.

What matters in electricity is not how much – it is when. Electricity when it is needed has value. Electricity when nobody needs it has none. Wind turbines often produce exactly then – on a windy night, when demand is low. The price turns negative: the system is literally paying someone to take it, and the surplus only strains the grid. And when the wind stops, someone else has to keep the lights on.

A price is a message: this is needed, now. A negative price says: please, stop. A system that keeps producing anyway isn’t green. It’s deaf.

That’s mental communism applied to energy: the wish before reality.

Regimes that entertain such delusions end up going broke – and then they collapse.

October 23, 2026

Faint signs of civilizational hope: “The Great Un-Karening”

Filed under: Health, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

It’s become old hat for Generation Jones and Generation X grizzled grognards to moan on about the almost-unsupervised “come back when the streetlights come on” childhood they remember in comparison to the over-scheduled, over-organized, over-computerized, hyper-supervised situation too many children now find themselves in. But there’s an occasional glimmer that things are changing:

The Great Un-Karening has begun, and decades of cultural engineering have finally run into something their architects cannot fucking control: human nature.

A seven-year-old conquers El Capitan, breaking his older brother’s record, and some sanctimonious busybody responds by reporting his father to Child Protective Services. Apparently, raising children capable of extraordinary achievements now qualifies as suspicious parenting.

And that tells you everything about the suffocating bullshit we’ve allowed to masquerade as progress.

For years, the helicopter-parenting crowd, DEI bureaucrats, ideological school administrators, and professional grievance merchants have worked to remake childhood in their own miserable image. Courage became recklessness. Masculinity became toxic. Independence became neglect. Every hurt feeling became an emergency, and every whining control freak acquired a fresh excuse to interfere.

They built entire systems around rewarding fragility, policing behavior, and teaching children to view the world through the narrow lens of identity, victimhood, and institutional permission.

And now the machinery is encountering resistance.

Kids are reportedly refusing school Pride Day activities. Parents are defending their children’s right to adventure. Twenty to forty neighborhood kids organized their own nighttime pursuit game, complete with strategies, head starts, and a mile-long course. Some neighborhood hall monitor called security.

The kids kept playing.

Fucking beautiful.

There’s the nightmare for the self-appointed guardians of acceptable behavior: children discovering they can organize their own lives without a diversity consultant, a school psychologist, or some miserable asshole clutching a rulebook.

And every independent decision chips away at the authority these people spent years accumulating.

The Karens can scream. The bureaucrats can threaten. The ideological busybodies can keep issuing commandments from their increasingly ridiculous little thrones.

The generation they expected to mold into obedient, perpetually offended dependents is discovering the exhilarating pleasure of telling them to piss off.

They tried to rewrite normalcy.

Now they’re watching the next generation reclaim it without asking their fucking permission.

October 22, 2026

The Cold War era research grant model has been a disaster for universities

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Education, Government, Military, Science, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Before the Second World War, governments generally did not directly sponsor research in their universities. With the example of the Manhattan Project and other less-well-known directed research efforts, western governments all accepted the notion that it was part of their national defence mandate to push research efforts by way of indirect or direct funding. This spread from the STEM fields directly related to weapon development to pretty much every area of academia. Lorenzo Warby explains why this has been a major contributor to the decline of western universities and the quality of research they undertake:

By “crank the handle” notions, I mean analyses that focus so much on resources that they end up massively underestimating the importance of information — and information landscapes — in understanding human social dynamics, given that we are biological beings who use information and resources to maintain ourselves. So, a “just add capital” approach to foreign aid is a “crank the handle” approach. Attempted analysis of long-term economic growth based on some derivation of a Cobb-Douglas production function is a “crank the handle” approach. (The disastrous — and revealing — limitations of such production functions will be discussed further in the next post in the series.)

One of the many problems with the “crank the handle” approaches that the terms capitalism and capitalist so encourage — by implying use and control of capital is the crucial thing, regardless of information landscapes and reality-tests — is the innovation-is-good cargo cult that has generated disastrous incentives in and for academe. Like all cargo cults, the innovation-is-good cargo cult mimics some of the surface appearance of successful innovation without replicating (or understanding) any of the substance.

Yes, it is absolutely true that technological innovation generated mass prosperity. But there are several key features to note.

  1. Most new ideas are crap. (So are a lot of old ideas: especially those repackaged by folk who don’t have to make things work.)
  2. Technological innovation is not merely a process of invention, it also requires successful implementation.
  3. Commercial innovation has a strong reality-test: does it make a buck? The profit/loss continuum tests ideas (both old and new) and their implementation.
  4. The energy take-off that we call the Industrial Revolution arose from Britain being the first society to adopt learning-by-experiment at scale; so learning via inherent feedbacks from what did, or did not, work.
  5. That energy use take-off occurred because no elite coalition vetoed it.

The post-1945 adoption of the bureaucratically-delivered research grant system was a reaction in part to the Second World War — which was so much a technological war — and to the pressures of Cold War geopolitical competition with the Soviet Union. War generates serious reality-tests for weapons and other military technology. This reality-testing of weapons continued throughout the Cold War, as both Western and Soviet weapons were used in various conflicts.

The bureaucratised research grant model — whether government or non-profit — used to fund “innovation” within academe fails to grapple with what made either industrial innovation (with its commercial reality-tests) or military innovation (with rather brutal reality-tests) work. There also turn out to be major problems with trying to bureaucratise the Scientific Revolution.

Bureaucratised research grants treat innovation as presumptively good, when most new ideas are crap. It treats mere invention as some achievement, when inventing new ideas is hardly difficult or reliably useful. Such invention is even less difficult if there is no reality tests; if those propagating and judging those ideas do not have to make anything work in any practical, seriously-constrained-by-reality — not-just-performative — sense.

Outside the military realm and STEM (Science Technology Engineering Medicine), there are no reality-tests systematically built into the research grant process: only what plays to academic status games due to academic approval becoming the operative test. Academic approval is an amazingly weak filter. Consider Adam Smith’s famous remark about English universities:

    An English university is a sanctuary in which exploded systems and obsolete prejudices find shelter and protection after they have been hunted out of every corner of the world.

Marxism and its derivatives (e.g. Critical Theory) come to mind. Any use of Marxism — or its derivatives — requires massive discounting and rationalising away of tens of millions of deaths and a couple of dozen tyrannies. (So, of course, does any use of Left as a positive moral category, given that being Left includes Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Mengistu, Kim il-Sung …)

Moreover, across much of academe, we do not see the use of experimentation or observation to test claims, but rather “findings” baked into the “research”. “Findings” that are validated precisely because they garner academic approval.

October 20, 2026

Elon Musk’s evil plan to turn American youth into filthy capitalists

Filed under: Business, Economics, Space, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Did you hear the latest outrage? Arch-capitalist exploiter Elon Musk — reportedly the richest man in the world — intends to bribe American children by giving them each a share in one of his most important businesses. On X, Brivael Le Pogam has thoughts:

In 2021, the head of the UN World Food Programme said $6 billion from Elon Musk could solve world hunger.

Elon replied: publish the plan, right here, publicly, and I’ll sell Tesla stock on the spot.

The plan came out. And when you read it, it wasn’t a plan to solve hunger. It was one year of food for 42 million people. A twelve-month subscription. And the year after? Start over.

A few months later, Elon summed up his view: if you care about the reality of goodness rather than the perception of it, philanthropy is extremely difficult.

“Reality of goodness over perception of goodness.”

That line stuck with me for weeks. Does philanthropy actually work?

Gates-style philanthropy is first and foremost institutional capture. Foundations funding NGOs, funding governments, funding programs, producing reports, producing photos. Everyone’s happy, and the aid machine keeps itself alive. Sixty years and hundreds of billions later, much of Africa is still dependent on aid. Zambian economist Dambisa Moyo laid it out in Dead Aid: aid breeds dependency, feeds corruption, and short-circuits the only mechanism that has ever lifted a country out of poverty.

So what actually works?

It’s been tested. In Kenya, Berkeley researchers working with GiveDirectly randomly selected villages and gave every poor household about $1,000 in cash. No program. No training. No conditions. Just cash.

The result: people bought metal roofs, livestock, started small businesses. Barely any inflation. And every dollar injected generated around $2.50 of economic activity locally, including for neighbors who received nothing.

Why? Because you didn’t give them charity. You gave them capital. You primed the pump.

And that’s where everything hinges: ownership. Hernando de Soto showed that the world’s poor hold trillions of dollars in assets, but without recognized property titles, it’s dead capital. You can’t borrow against it, pass it on, or grow it. Where property rights are respected, the system starts running. Where they aren’t, no amount of aid will ever be enough.

Now reread Elon’s post.

“Next year, I will give one of my SpaceX shares to every kid in America. This will be the first of many.”

That’s not a meal. That’s not a handout. That’s a property title. A piece of the company building the infrastructure of a multiplanetary civilization, owned directly by millions of kids.

A kid who gets a handout depends on the state. A kid who owns a share of SpaceX owns a piece of the future. He learns what an asset is, he has a stake in the economy working, and one day he’ll vote as an owner, not as a client of the state.

Gates buys perception. Musk distributes ownership.

The reality of goodness versus its perception. And it’s absolutely brilliant.

October 19, 2026

“If alternative energy is a ‘lower-cost’ solution they shouldn’t need prodding from a wise and benevolent state”

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Environment, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

John Robson points out that words do have meanings and calling expensive things “cheap” and cheap things “expensive” doesn’t actually change their economic or environmental value in the real world:

Martian fighting machines striding over Horsell Common … no, wait, these are actually wind turbines on Wolfe Island, near Kingston, Ontario.

When it comes to the alleged green energy transition and its flood of cheap power and paradisaically green, lucrative and fulfilling jobs, those with even fairly short historical memories will recall that the “Green New Deal” legislative package was meant to do for the US economy what Franklin Roosevelt’s “New Deal” had supposedly done in the 1930s. Those of us who think the main achievement of the “New Deal” was to extend a sharp recession into a decade-long depression through a massive set of taxes and regulations driven by inane economic theory, for instance plowing crops under to fight hunger under the AAA, didn’t even find that claim appealing. But others sure did, and with about as much to show for it.

As Wikipedia put it, after tracing uses of the term back to 2007:

    The 2019 United States congressional resolution Recognizing the duty of the Federal Government to create a Green New Deal introduced by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ed Markey advocated a ‘just transition’, counteracting previous systemic injustices that had disproportionally hurt vulnerable communities. A ‘just transition’ relies on increasing social and economic equity and access to opportunity which are crucial components of the Green New Deal and principles of environmental and social justice.

For these hyper adherents to Thomas Sowell’s “unconstrained vision”, just saving the planet isn’t enough. You also have to save the economy, eliminate injustice and after lunch world peace.

In Canada, where we pride ourselves so fiercely on our “elbows up” independence from the United States that we call our system of socialized medicine brought in back in 1966 “Medicare” after um uh the American program from 1964, there are calls for “A Green New Deal for Canadian Sovereignty” which appears to be the US version with maple syrup:

    This will allow us to quickly transition from an economy excessively reliant on serving the United States and based on exploitation and the burning of fossil fuels, to one that is more self-reliant, driven by dignified work, clean renewable energy, more equitable and with efficient public services for all.

Oh. Just that? Who knew giving up oil and gas in a cold northern country could fix government health care? Well, Greenpeace Canada, for one, with their 2019 infographic that includes “Create a plan for 1 million good green jobs” (shades of Mole from Pogo exclaiming “A plan! You’re right! I’ll need a plan!”). And with this one, wait, you also get “Indigenous rights” and “proportional representation” and “BETTER LIFE FOR ALL” and “Build clean industries”. Oh and “Grant personhood protections to forests and bodies of water”. And interfaith harmony and a guy in a wheelchair and all that there.

Mind you, the bit where you “Build clean industries” still appears to face a few minor hurdles, like building clean industries. And why just 1 million good green jobs? Why not 5 million, or 53 million, or 628 billion? Since climate transition enthusiasts don’t do practical well.

For instance Canary Media just launched a publication “California Wire” dedicated to telling you the transition that failed in California worked in California:

    I’m launching this newsletter at an intriguing moment in California politics. Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom – who everyone knows is eyeing a run for the White House – has one last chance to show his true colors on energy and climate change. Rising electricity costs are a major issue in California, and Newsom must decide by the end of this month whether to sign a host of bills that could help cut utility rates while also advancing the state’s clean energy transition. What message does he want to send to Californians and the rest of the country?

Dude, he already “sent a message” that this GND is pie in the sky and energy gets more expensive not less. And not because he hid his “true colors on energy and climate change” but because he waved them in everyone’s face while shouting about the subject. So now all he needs to do is wave his pen? Yup:

    a few bills on his desk now could at least start the long slog of reforms that experts say will help make power more affordable.

Oh wait. Experts say. But long slog? Help make it more affordable? Why the Dickens isn’t it already more affordable since these kinds of people keep telling us wind and solar are now cheaper than oil and gas, and let’s not even mention coal, and Newsom’s true colours are wind and solar?

Indeed, he calls for:

    a precursor to setting up regulations that could steer them [utilities] toward prioritizing lower-cost solutions over expensive grid upgrades.

Talk about leaping into verbiage. And also error, since if alternative energy is a “lower-cost” solution they shouldn’t need prodding from a wise and benevolent state, and if they’re not, you’re just making things worse by persisting in your delusion.

October 17, 2026

British disability programs may extend to 25% of the population under current criteria

Filed under: Britain, Bureaucracy, Government, Health — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 04:00

In the above-the-paywall portion of his latest post, eugyppius makes the case that the British social state, along with most other western countries, has metastasized to the point that it is uncontrollable:

Production line for the VW Beetle – symbol of a happier age, when our politicians forged a new democratic social state in Germany that today can no longer be financed or reformed.
Photo from eugyppius: a plague chronicle

On Sunday the Wall Street Journal published a long article headlined “The Welfare State is Crushing Britain“. It focusses on but one aspect of the UK social system, namely disability and sickness benefits, and its details are equal measures depressing, familiar, predictable and alarming.

Like other European redistributionist schemes, British disability payouts have steadily ballooned in the postwar period – expanding from a niche benefit for those unable to work due to serious illness and on-the-job injuries to a morass of programmes that showers millions of people with billions in pointless, self-defeating subsidies.

A 2024 government survey found that fully 25% of the entire British population might be considered disabled under present inflationary criteria, which adds perspective to the eye-watering figure of 10% presently drawing benefits. The fastest growth in disability claims occurs among working-age demographics, where compensation, once granted, soon becomes a powerful disincentive to work. In this way the British disability system actively cannibalises its own tax base. The total bill for sickness and disability benefits this year will exceed £100 billion, which comes on top of the £280 billion the British taxpayer presently spends on healthcare and which substantially outstrips the £68 billion British defence budget. Disability spending has jumped 25% over the last four years, and without reforms it will rise another 30% over the next four. Fuzzy psychiatric disability claims, from depression to ADHD, drive much of the expansion, as a whole universe of charities and AI-powered chatbots advise ever more able-bodied people on how they might opt in to this wonderful system of free money. Among many crazy details, we learn that those on disability can trade some of their cash benefits for new car leases every three years. This programme now accounts for one in seven automobile sales in Britain and has elevated the company handling these deals (Motability) to the largest automobile leasing concern in the country. The debt required to fund this and the rest of the British social system has driven borrowing costs to rates not seen since the 2008 financial crisis, while high taxes continue to encourage the emigration of the wealthy and productive.

These are the mere symptoms of a sickness that extends well beyond the United Kingdom. We are looking here at a fiscal and also a political crisis afflicting the entire postwar European model. Below the fold I want to explain the nature of this crisis and why our political systems seem powerless to address its fundamental causes – indeed, why many of our politicians seem determined to make it worse. With little chance of reform, we face a future of economic decay and declining living standards, culminating in sovereign debt crises and perhaps even political collapse. The postwar order is slowly dying, in its eighty-first year, of old age. There are no answers and nobody knows what will come next.

John Carter commented on Substack Notes:

The neglect of schools in order to pay for pensions is a particularly poignant phenomenon, a direct illustration of the old devouring the futures of the young. Eugyppius is correct that there’s no electoral solution to this mess. No one will vote to reduce their own benefits, and tax-eaters now comprise such a substantial electorate that any serious discussion of reform is political suicide.

State bankruptcy and economic collapse are real possibilities. Maybe “and then a dictator ends democracy” happens, but maybe not. For the young the all-devouring social state is increasingly unbearable. Polities that make themselves attractive to the young rather than the old could suck in such a large fraction of the youth that by the time collapse arrives, the social states are effectively retirement communities, and it just looks like a humanitarian crisis of starving geriatrics dying in their own unwashed bodily fluids.

October 16, 2026

Clarkson’s … goats

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

I started watching Clarkson’s Farm, although I got interrupted after a few seasons so I haven’t caught up to the most recent season. On X, Sama Hoole talks about the goats Jeremy Clarkson recently added to the farm:

Jeremy Clarkson switched on an electric fence so his goats could get used to it, and a goat gets used to a fence the way it gets used to anything, by testing it until it gives.

Lizzie, the goat farmer he bought them from, warned him they would be out, and she was right. A sheep accepts a fence. A cow leans on it and thinks. A goat regards it as a question somebody has asked, and answers.

They had been bought for the half of Diddly Squat no tractor can touch, a bank of bramble and thorn that would take a man with a brushcutter all week. The goats went on it, and in Clarkson’s own words one bramble bush was in real trouble inside five minutes.

Nothing else on four legs can do this. A goat would rather eat a hedge than a lawn. The mouth is small and the lip is split, so it picks a leaf out from between two thorns the way you would pick out a splinter. It stands on its hind legs for the top of the hedge. It leans on a sapling until the crown comes down. It eats gorse, strips bark, chews through leaves that cattle and sheep spit out, and comes back in the morning for the regrowth.

Oakland keeps a herd on its hillsides against the fires. Portugal pays shepherds to walk goats through its mountains before the summer burns. The firebreak that saved the Reagan Library in 2019 had been chewed that spring. Network Rail has put them on the cliffs at Folkestone.

The oldest farm animal there is, 10,000 years in the job, is being rediscovered as green technology, and in all that time it has learned nothing about fences.

The thicket goes in one end and comes out the other as kids and milk.

Clarkson’s land agent has never once told him a goat was a sound investment. The goats have never once asked him.

October 13, 2026

The Un-Coupling of Gen Z

Filed under: Britain, Health, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

One of the most obvious demographic shifts in recent years has been the ongoing decline in the birth rate in pretty much the entire western world. But it isn’t surprising in one respect: Gen Z people aren’t forming relationships at the rate of earlier generations and have fewer (if any) sexual partners:

Why are so many Americans not getting married — or not even dating, in the first place?

The share of 40-year-olds who have never been hitched has quadrupled since 1980, as Americans get married later, or not at all.

It’s not just marriage that’s declining but rather all forms of cohabitation. An analysis by John Burn-Murdoch found that “coupling” has declined steadily in both the UK and the U.S., especially for those without a college degree. The declining popularity of dating apps suggests that these trends are likely to continue.

I care about the decline of coupling and marriage not because I consider myself a strict evangelist of matrimony — I think people should do what they can to enjoy themselves without hurting others — but rather because I think it bears on two of the most important questions about the future: (1) How many people exist, and (2) how happy are they? The relationship between romance and births is practically linear. Since 1990, Burn-Murdoch has shown, the decline of births traces the decline of relationship formation across many countries. Fewer relationships mean fewer people, and accelerating population declines around the world are, somewhat like climate change, a slowly accumulating phenomenon that will almost certainly shape the future of economics, technology, and the texture of human existence.

Then, there’s the mushy yet momentous question of whether people actually enjoy their existence. Self-reported happiness is declining in the west, and particularly in the U.S. Reviewing several decades of General Social Survey data, the economist Sam Peltzman came to the conclusion that “most of the overall downturn [in life satisfaction] is attributable to decline in marriage post-2000”. Reviewing Peltzman’s work, The Atlantic‘s Olga Khazan provided some useful context:

    One paper alone might be easy enough to dismiss, but this is a fairly consistent finding dating back decades in social-science research: Married people are happier. Period.

If the decline of coupling is upstream of both falling births and falling happiness, then the most important question is what’s happening at the source. In his new book Generation Uncoupled, Daniel Cox, a public opinion researcher and director of the Survey Center on American Life, considers a range of causes that span technology, culture, media, economics, and politics.

October 10, 2026

Tim Worstall argues that the BC drug decision was correct

Filed under: Cancon, Health, Law, Liberty — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

I don’t always agree with Tim Worstall‘s takes, but he’s quite convinced that the recent decision in British Columbia to create a new human right to buy and sell drugs is correct and will lead to better outcomes than the existing law:

Image courtesy of Meme Generator

Drug dealing — branded drug dealing — is now legal. Or it will be once the 6 month stay expires or the Canadian Parliament changes the law.

The change in the law that should — won’t, but should — is that branded drug dealing should be legal.

That humans like to get blitzed is true. That humans like to get blitzed so much that every time anywhere tries to stop it — short of immediate execution for users and dealers — means that whatever the law says there’s always that market in ways to get blitzed. There are two arguments for making it legal to get blitzed. One is the simple liberal point that it’s our own life to waste and we each get to chart our own path — whether sooner or later — to the inevitable grave. The other is that for most drugs the consumption of the pure stuff doesn’t do much harm.

Sure, sure, cocaine turns people into obnoxious wankers but decent heroin has few physical problems and users tend to spend their time contemplating the joys of an enhanced reality. Not my thing but, you know, Meh.

The illegal stuff kills at least tens of thousands to get to us and then tens, if not hundreds, of thousands more through being stepped upon, cut, polluted and then the basic public health problems of AIDS ridden whores — of both, or any, sex — tricking to pay for the next dirty needle full.

We have a solution to this. A known solution. Capitalism. Capitalism in the full light of day and under the rule of law. We don’t just want we positively lust after corporations to make pure junk. Branded, pure, junk. Their brand dependent upon how good the highs are at the price of how few deaths. Their profit depends upon maintaining the value of that brand.

That is, turn that always present human greed into our purity guarantee. Same thing that keeps the rats out of our bread supply — WonderLoaf finding that rat bits in the sandwich reduce their sales.

So, Marlboro branded heroin, that’s the thing. And, yes, Marlboro, they’ve already got that association with horse, haven’t they?

October 5, 2026

There’s never any good news on the climate front

Filed under: Environment, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

John Robson calls out the extreme rhetoric employed by environmentalists and their journalist flappers to try to keep climate anxieties as high as possible, especially if there haven’t been any new alarming climate-related events to build on:

The New York Times engages in some classic yellow journalism with “Climate: Disaster Survivors Sticking Together” teasing to a column by David Gelles that starts “Extreme weather is hitting more people with each passing year”. But it’s not, even though there are more people for it to hit with each passing year as the climate crisis coincides strangely with unprecedented human material flourishing and a 99 percent drop in climate-related fatalities. We accept that there is room for intelligent and well-meaning debate about facts as well as their meaning. But the drumbeat of assertions by climate fanatics that the weather is getting worse when it’s just not crosses the line into bad-faith bellowing ignorance.

Another Times story titillates with a “CALCULATOR” of:

    Is Your City Prepared for Climate Disaster? A new report ranks the world’s large cities on how well they have adapted to face climate risk.

What exactly “climate risk” is, unless they mean bad weather, is not explained. Why the Times thinks bad weather is new is also not explained. What the Times thinks of the fact that even as global population soars, the number of people killed every year by bad weather has plummeted, not the proportion but the absolute number, is apparently nothing. Instead they lead off:

    When it comes to the effects of hostile climates – flood, fire and more – what matters isn’t just inherent risk, but rather the ability of a place to withstand that risk.

Well, duh. And clearly wealthier societies are far better able to withstand that risk, so even if you believe that fossil fuels make the weather a bit worse, the tradeoff is well worth making. But so is the effort to see if the weather is getting worse.

Now we don’t deny that “fire” is a hostile climate. But if it’s an “effect” of hostile climate, then the climate has always been hostile since what evidence we have says there were a lot more wildfires two and three hundred years ago than there are now. Don’t wait for them to credit CO2 with the decrease though … since they didn’t bother looking it up.

That story also blathers about how things from “early warning systems” to “governance” can “significantly mitigate the effects of climate change” although climate change is not a causal force it’s a statistical description of how the weather has altered in some place over at least 30 years. And it says Chicago is the most resilient city with “low hurricane risk” due, we point out, not to them building a big windbreak or something but it not being in the path of the hurricanes that regularly sweep through other parts of the US and have for as long as there have been observers to flee them shouting “Whoa Nelly a twister!” Moreover:

    Many of the least resilient places were South Asian cities with extreme exposure to floods and monsoons to which they were poorly adapted.

And if the Times seriously thinks monsoons are a new and horrible consequence of the gasoline-powered automobile you should cancel your subscription before it puts some other nonsense in your head. Like that floods and mudslides in rural Nepal and Tibet are relevant to urban resilience.

Media outlets have always had a strong bias toward reporting bad news, “If it bleeds, it leads!” but on the climate beat, there’s never any good news to report because everything — warming, cooling, precipitation, seasonal change — has to be presented in a negative light.

“The fertility crisis is really the equality crisis”

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

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Devon Eriksen responds to a post about the need for middle class couples to budget excessive amounts of money before starting a family:

It’s not about the money.

Money has an effect, yes, but it’s a part of something bigger.

Women are genetically programmed to mate up. Not down. And not even across. Up. If she doesn’t regard a man as superior to her, she generally doesn’t want to have his babies.

What this means is that there is an extremely simple control dial on fertility.

More male power and status = more babies.
More female power and status = less babies.

Yes, it really is that simple.

Why? Because every species has a mating ritual, and can only breed if they can carry it out. That’s why you can breed rats and chickens in cages, but not pandas. Different mating ritual.

And a critical element of the human mating ritual is “male impresses female”.

Not charms. Not bribes. Definitely not respects.

Impresses.

So, if you take power, wealth, and status away from men, and give it to women, you are just plain reaching for the controls and turning down the fertility dial.

If you let men keep power, wealth and status — you don’t have to give it to them because they’re the ones who create it — fertility goes up.

The fertility crisis is really the equality crisis.

This idea might horrify you. You might have been taught all your life that everyone is equal, or must be, and anything else is unfair.

Well, have you looked around you at universe? Unfairness is baked into the life cycle of every living organism, not mention the food chain. Evolutionary processes don’t care about fairness. They care what works.

Perhaps someday, we will be able to code DNA as easily as we code C++, and can decide what we want our instincts to be. But until that day, we are faced with a choice.

1. Stop using the political, legal, and mass media processes to force female equality, if not outright female supremacy, on the first world.

Or

2. Die out and be replaced by third world retards, who will stay on this planet fighting wars with increasingly rusty AK47s and then spears, until the next asteroid comes along.

October 3, 2026

Singapore’s “Social Development Unit”

Filed under: Asia, Government, Health, History — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

We don’t tend to hear very much about Singapore, so I hadn’t heard of the “Social Development Unit” that they set up (appropriately, in 1984):

Haha this reminds me of when Singapore had this thing called the Social Development Unit which my American sociology professor told me was “basically government-sponsored eugenics”.

Back in the 80s, Lee Kuan Yew observed that female university graduates were not getting married, and that smart people weren’t breeding enough which he treated as a national emergency.

This led to the birth of the Social Development Unit in 1984 — government-sponsored parties, dinners, trips and even “love boat” cruises so that clever people could meet each other and, ideally, produce more clever babies. Locals immediately nicknamed it Single, Desperate and Ugly

There were other politically incorrect fertility policies of the era: the Graduate Mothers’ Scheme (kids of degree moms got priority school places), and higher tax breaks for those who were more educated with more kids. Meanwhile, cash grants were given to the lower educated and lower income parents who got sterilized after one or two kids.

To which Carl Benjamin responded:

Lee Kuan Yew is what happens when an autistic map gamer becomes president.

September 29, 2026

The “meta-crisis” that isn’t

Filed under: Economics, Environment, Food, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Anthony Watts refutes the media claims of climate change driving a large group of unrelated issues into a “meta-crisis” that — as these things always seem to do — requires co-ordinated central control of all human activity (the answer always, always seems to be an all-powerful world government, doesn’t it?).

Image from Watts Up With That

Euronews claims climate change has evolved into a “meta-crisis” threatening food security, energy supplies, economies, water resources, and international security. This is misleading because the article largely substitutes predictions and assertions for measurements of what is actually happening. The data show global crop production and yields reaching record levels, deaths from extreme weather collapsing over the long term, and many of today’s energy and economic problems arising from political choices and geopolitical conflicts rather than changes in climate.

Euronews builds its case primarily around an interview with Emmanuella Doussis, UNESCO Chair on Climate Diplomacy at the University of Athens. Doussis declares climate change an economic, social, political, and geopolitical problem, linking it to competition for resources, migration, water shortages, food insecurity, and the energy transition.

Those are sweeping claims. Curiously, Euronews provides remarkably little observational evidence demonstrating that climate change is actually causing the worldwide “meta-crisis” its headline announces.

Perhaps the most obvious contradiction concerns food.

Doussis predicts, “We will face a very large, serious problem with food security.” But predictions about what might happen cannot erase what is happening.

Climate at a Glance: Crop Production summarizes data from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization showing that global crop production and yields have risen dramatically during the period of modern warming. Its latest summary reports that the 2023 and 2024 global crop years produced the two highest global crop yields per acre on record.

Climate Realism has documented the same trend repeatedly. Global production of staple crops has increased substantially, and yields have repeatedly set records during recent decades. Even where individual crops suffer poor regional seasons because of drought, floods, pests, or other causes, that is not evidence of a deteriorating global food supply.

There are good reasons for this improvement. Agricultural technology, irrigation, fertilizers, improved crop varieties, mechanization, and better pest control have transformed farming. Modest warming can also lengthen growing seasons and reduce damaging frost events in some regions, while additional atmospheric carbon dioxide generally stimulates plant growth and improves water-use efficiency.

None of this means weather cannot damage crops. It always has. It means that portraying climate change as presently creating a global food-security crisis conflicts with the direction of observed agricultural production.

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