THE DANES ARE FINALLY GOING NUCLEAR: They have to because of all their renewables. “Most of the renewed interest in nuclear seen around the world stems from the expected growth in electricity demand from AI data centres, but Denmark is different. The Danes are concerned about possible blackouts similar to the one that struck Iberia recently. Like Spain and Portugal, Denmark is heavily dependent on weather-based renewable energy which is not very compatible with the way power grids operate.”
Author Archive: Glenn Reynolds
May 18, 2025
Quoth Trump: “In the end, the so-called ‘nation-builders’ wrecked far more nations than they built — and the interventionists were intervening in complex societies that they did not even understand themselves.”
There’s no particular reason to think that they even understand what makes their own societies work.
MARK JUDGE: Jake Tapper Is Why We Can’t Quit Stephen Glass. “This is why, even decades after the fact, Stephen Glass remains such a compelling journalistic figure and a totem rather than a villain for liberal journalists. They have adopted Glass’s strategy of lying to cover lies and then adding lies, except unlike Glass they – with good reason – think they can now get away with it. Their colleagues will protect them.”
ALEX BERENSON: Why we need to humiliate Joe Biden. “Exposing his cognitive decline may seem cruel. He’s a sad old man. But it’s necessary; it’s the best way to keep other similarly addled sad old men from clinging to power at all costs.”
True, but even more important to humiliate — or worse — the people who enabled him and covered up his decline in order to exercise unearned power.
May 17, 2025
THE NEW SPACE RACE: FAA license update brings SpaceX closer to next Starship launch.
MOST VIOLENT SO FAR: The Most Violent Solar Storm Ever Detected Hit Earth in 12350 BCE.
EVERYTHING IS GOING SWIMMINGLY, GUYS! Wait, Trump Is Up By *How Much* Now? Dems Are Going to Implode.
GOOD NEWS FOR THE CRUISE INDUSTRY: Oral norovirus vaccine candidate successfully tested in human challenge trial.
A TRUMP CHANGE: You Hate Start/Stop Tech, and the EPA Chief Agrees: Here’s What Might Happen. “In a post on X, Zeldin said the Environmental Protection Agency is ‘fixing’ the tech, adding bluntly: ‘Everyone hates it.'”
ANY CUSTOMER COULD TELL YOU THIS IS A LIE: Meta argues enshittification isn’t real in bid to toss FTC monopoly case.. I’d love to go back to the Facebook of 2009.
((Fixed a typo. –Charlie) fixed a typo in fixing a typo. —Charlie)
MARS AIN’T THE KIND OF PLACE TO RAISE YOUR KIDS. IN FACT IT’S COLD AS HELL. Mars weather: Clear with a low of 114 below zero.
Plenty of heat for your colony once you get a nice nuclear plant going, though. And highs are in the 70s.
BIRTHRATES: Baby bonuses won’t solve the birthrate problem: Only culture, not cash, can spark a new boom in having kids.
Baby bonuses prove “costly and ineffective” almost everywhere they are tried, wrote Leonard Lopoo, a professor of public administration and international affairs at Syracuse University, in a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed. Considering how expensive it can be to raise a child — roughly $300,000 over 18 years, according to a new LendingTree analysis — what difference is a relatively modest “baby bonus” going to make? The prospect of a government check might induce a couple already committed to parenthood to get pregnant a little sooner. But is it going to convince adults who don’t want a baby to change their minds? Hardly.
Government benefits and incentives may have some impact at the margins, but ultimately the only real strategy for reversing demographic decline is to change cultural norms surrounding marriage and child-rearing. That is the lesson from Israel, the one advanced country where the fertility rate remains far above replacement level, at more than 2.9 children per woman. All the factors that usually lead to falling birthrates are present in Israel: a rising cost of living, pronounced female participation in the workforce, high rates of education, easily accessible birth control, expensive housing. Yet fertility remains incredibly robust — not only among Israel’s most traditional and religious communities, but also among the far more numerous Israelis who live modern or secular lifestyles.
“The real secret to Israel’s fertility rates appears to be cultural,” wrote Danielle Kubes in Canada’s National Post in 2023. “The family is at the absolute center of Israeli life. Getting married and having kids is the highest cultural value.” It is a value that goes beyond religious observance and political ideology. It cannot be explained by government financial aid (welfare benefits in Israel are comparable to those in Western Europe). Rather, it boils down to this: Israelis of every stripe share a conviction that having children is the best and highest means of imbuing life with meaning.
Related: Harrison Butker, Harbinger: Life during and after the coming Demographic Winter.
THIS NEEDS TO BE STOPPED, IN A WAY THAT SETS AN EXAMPLE THAT WILL PREVENT FUTURE ELECTION CANCELING:
setting up another bullshit Russia predicate to invalidate Poland’s elections in case the wrong party wins this weekend https://t.co/zOBdxOQhr6
— Mike Benz (@MikeBenzCyber) May 17, 2025