OPEN THREAD: Because I love you and want you to be happy.
Archive for 2025
August 24, 2025
I BLAME BLUE HADES: Giant Chunks of The Seafloor Are Mysteriously Upside Down, Scientists Find. “Deep beneath the waves of the North Sea, the seafloor is behaving in an unexpected way. There, scientists have discovered hundreds of vast sand mounds, some on the scale of several kilometers across, that, according to a release from the University of Manchester in the UK, ‘defy fundamental geological principles’.”
FOLLOW THE SCIENCE: Surprising Study Finds Meat May Protect Against Cancer Risk.
QUESTIONS NOBODY IS ASKING: “Is aircon right wing? How cooling systems got caught in a culture war, “ the London Independent claims.
Even though the UK has nowhere near the 90 per cent of homes in the US with air conditioning, demand for some kind of relief from the heat is reportedly soaring, with a 64 per cent increase in AC unit sales between 2023 and 2024. The UK Energy Research Centre (UKERC) estimates that up to a third of British homes will have aircon by 2050.
This is a fundamental change in the way we live. For decades, anything over 25 in the UK has been proclaimed “a scorcher” by the newspapers. Puzzled American tourists complaining about the lack of AC in Britain would be told wryly that the country is naturally air-conditioned most of the year round.
However, across ever-hotter Europe, when it comes to turning your house into a fridge, there is a large, sweaty elephant in the room.
Attacking the climate crisis head-on using technology, with the accompanying summer surge in electricity usage – an extra 7 gigawatts of it, according to the UKERC – is becoming deeply political.
People broadly on the right are prepared to put comfort ahead of environmental concerns. People broadly on the left tend to say that aircon is distinctly uncool, almost as if sweating through the summer is our moral comeuppance for humanity’s longstanding profligacy.
You know what else is distinctly uncool? Making insane doomsday predictions:
Also, I’d like to know if the Independent believes that greater access to air conditioning would benefit this beleaguered class:
In any case, in America, it’s best to not take chances. As Glenn wrote in 2016: Ban A/C for DC! “We won two world wars without air conditioning our federal employees. Nothing in their performance over the last 50 or 60 years suggests that A/C has improved things. Besides, The Washington Post informs us that A/C is sexist, and that Europeans think it’s stupid.”
OF COURSE, THE DEPRESSION WAS CAUSED BY GOVERNMENT POLICIES: Access to green spaces helped guard against depression during pandemic.
THE NEW SPACE RACE: SpaceX eyes Starship reusability milestones in rocket’s tenth flight test.
Launch is scheduled for 7:30pm Eastern, weather permitting.
You can watch it live here.
YA THINK?
That mugshot was a huge backfire🤣😂 pic.twitter.com/iQ11txThDO
— Marie Isabella (@MarieIsabellaB) August 24, 2025
VDH: Joy Reid and the Rise of Open Racism From the Left (Video).
METAPHOR ALERT:
This is perfect. The rich socialist has a working class guy actually lift the weight to advance his career. Poetry. https://t.co/8kwX1bNpSx
— David Marcus (@BlueBoxDave) August 24, 2025
Current Mayor Eric Adams dubs Mamdani “Mamscrawny:”
64 vs. 33. A lifetime of hard work vs. a silver spoon. The results speak for themselves.
The weight of the job is too heavy for “Mamscrawny.” The only thing he can lift is your taxes. pic.twitter.com/HR6fDPKn0B
— Eric Adams (@ericadamsfornyc) August 24, 2025
It’s an amusing pun, but Adams might to want to focus more on protecting his citizens rather than crafting mean tweets:
You'll notice how it's only after the white guy defends himself from a knife-wielding attacker that the police step in, and it is the innocent victim of crime who is arrested for defending himself
This is what anarcho-tyranny looks like
“Your punishment for having a knife when… https://t.co/l0zUEMw2BX
— Will Tanner (@Will_Tanner_1) August 24, 2025
STAY SAFE: Headlamp Rechargeable 3000 High Lumens Super Bright LED Head Lamp. #CommissionEarned
AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD:
John Bolton Eludes FBI By Blending Into A Herd Of Walruses https://t.co/lIgEOkVSJt pic.twitter.com/cxjDQDIc6z
— The Babylon Bee (@TheBabylonBee) August 22, 2025
STAY SAFE WITH ANTI-SLIP BACKING: Smiry Bathroom Rugs Mat 48×32. #CommissionEarned
BRITAIN’S FLAG WARS FLY IN THE FACE OF NATIONAL SELF-LOATHING:
To the annoyance of Tower Hamlets, Birmingham, and many other local councils, the British and English flags tend to go back up almost as quickly as they can take them down. They are being hung on lampposts, displayed out the windows of private homes, draped over motorway bridges, and even painted onto roundabouts. Over the last few weeks, a genuinely grassroots movement has sprung up, led by Brits who are tired of being told they should hate their country and their culture.
It’s not difficult to see what led us to this point. Our flags have become demonised and denigrated. The Union Jack has been turned into a symbol of impotent British twee at best and colonialism and empire at worst. St. George’s Cross has suffered a much worse fate, being written off as outright racist. Today, there is only one socially acceptable use for the English flag. As Keir Starmer’s official spokesman, when asked what he thought about the ongoing flag wars, said, “We put up English flags all around Downing Street every time the English football team, women’s and men’s, are out, trying to win games for us.” Outside of these permitted contexts, UK flags are considered by the great and the good to be a kind of right-wing dog whistle. Black studies professor Kehinde Andrews appeared on national television this week to explain that the St. George’s Cross apparently “represents racism” and is intrinsically linked to colonialism and oppression.
No wonder Brits are fed up with having this nonsense rammed down their throats. For the best part of a decade, British people—like practically all other Western Europeans—have been taught to hate themselves. They have been lectured about their nation’s historic evils and the supposed worthlessness, even nonexistence, of their culture. It is impressed upon us, without any regard for historical accuracy, that practically everything Britain is today was actually built by foreigners.
Celebrating diversity, we are told, doesn’t apply to the many regional and national identities native to the British Isles. Just last month, a young girl was sent home from her school’s Culture Celebration Day because she was wearing a dress with the Union Jack on it. Pupils were encouraged to come dressed in cultural costumes, with the aim of “recognising and celebrating the rich cultural diversity within our school community.” Except, the native British apparently weren’t included in that. The girl wasn’t allowed to give a prepared speech on British values and was told that her outfit was “unacceptable.” Other pupils were also sent away for wearing clothes representing various British cultures, including a boy with a St. George’s flag, a boy with a Welsh flag, and a boy sporting a traditional flat cap. Some cultures, it seemed, were more multicultural than others.
Why, it’s as if:
JONATHAN TURLEY: The judicial Calvinball of Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson.
Jackson went ballistic after her colleagues reversed another district court judge who issued a sweeping injunction barring the Trump Administration from canceling roughly $783 million in grants in the National Institutes of Health.
Again writing alone, Jackson unleashed a tongue-lashing on her colleagues, who she suggested were unethical, unthinking cutouts for Trump. She denounced her fellow justices, stating, “This is Calvinball jurisprudence with a twist. Calvinball has only one rule: There are no fixed rules. We seem to have two: that one, and this administration always wins.”
For some of us who have followed Jackson’s interestingly controversial tenure on the court, it was crushingly ironic. Although Jackson accused her colleagues of following a new rule that they must always rule with Trump, she herself is widely viewed as the very embodiment of the actual rule of the made-up game based on the comic strip of Calvin and Hobbes. In Jacksonian jurisprudence, it often seems like there are no fixed rules, only fixed outcomes. She then attacks her colleagues for a lack of integrity or empathy.
To quote Calvin, Jackson proves that “there’s no problem so awful that you can’t add some guilt to it and make it even worse.”
Jackson has attacked her colleagues in opinions, shattering traditions of civility and restraint. Her colleagues have clearly had enough. She now regularly writes diatribes that neither of her fellow liberals — Justices Sonia Sotomayor or Elena Kagan — are willing to sign on to. Indeed, she has raged against opinions that her liberal colleagues have joined.
Read the whole thing.
TECH FEATURES DRIVERS LOVE, AND HATE.
HOW IT STARTED:
How it’s going:
As John Podhoretz tweeted immediately after Trump won his first term:
OLD AND BUSTED: Hipsters eschew CDs for vinyl to relieve the good old days.
The New Hotness? I started buying DVDs and CDs again in 2025 and it changed my mind about streaming.
You probably know the feeling — you’re in the mood to watch a movie, so you open up Netflix. The next thing you know, two hours have passed, and you still haven’t decided what to watch. Even when I go on a streaming platform, knowing what I’m looking for, it’s easy to get distracted by a homepage flooded with endless recommendations. Eventually, it starts to feel overwhelming and all that content just blurs together into one giant, forgettable backlog.
That’s why I’ve started buying CDs and DVDs again. I recently revived some old PC setups, so I thought it was time to try taking a similar trip back in time with my music and movies. What started as a passing interest in physical media ended up highlighting everything I’m missing out on with streaming.
I don’t have any great desire to buy DVDs, unless absolutely necessary, but 4k Blu-rays are about as close as possible to a film-like experience in the home.
READER FAVORITE: Glocusent 57 LED Music Stand Light, Clip-on Piano Light. #CommissionEarned
SO WILL PEOPLE WHO EAT THEM GET SUPER POWERS? OR DO WE HAVE TO WORRY ABOUT SUPER-POWERED SHRIMP? Possible radioactive contamination prompts 2nd frozen shrimp recall.
🚨 BREAKING: Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson is now implying his people will rise up against “tyranny” via riots and unrest against President Trump’s administration if he sends troops to Chicago to lower the crime rate.
— Eric Daugherty (@EricLDaugh) August 24, 2025
Mayor Daley’s best-known malapropism during the blue-on-blue riots of 1968 was of course, “The policeman isn’t there to create disorder; the policeman is there to preserve disorder.” That disorder has gotten far worse in the decades since, and not surprisingly, the Second City’s current mayor wants to do everything in his power to preserve his city’s dysfunction as well.
HEY, WHAT HAPPENED TO DEMOCRACY DYING IN DARKNESS?
