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In the 20th century, a foreign organism was deliberately introduced to a new environment to address a perceived imbalance.
The organism, characterized by its resilience and rapid reproduction, was released into the wild with little consideration for its long-term impact.
Initially, the plan appeared promising, as the new arrival showed enthusiasm for its new environment. However, unforeseen consequences soon emerged, as the organism's unchecked proliferation and indiscriminate predation began to disrupt the delicate balance of the local ecosystem.
Its presence, once hailed as a remedy, became a challenge that continues to perplex authorities to this day.
This post is not about cane toads.
svengali retweeted
I’ve come to realise something about modern political disagreement following my appearance last year on BBC Radio 4’s Moral Maze to discuss Net Zero. The whole experience completely changed my perspective on politics and sent me on a massive intellectual journey, forcing me to examine deep philosophical assumptions and beliefs I had long taken for granted.
During the discussion, I found myself returning to two deeply held convictions that I had long taken for granted: that Western civilisation has been, on balance, a moral force for good in the world, and that the Industrial Revolution represented an enormous advance for humanity. Both convictions are rooted in the Anglo-American Enlightenment tradition, with its belief in reason, individual liberty, scientific progress and the capacity of human beings to improve their material circumstances. I believe this view of modern Western civilisation is now under serious threat from within (left- and right-wing populism, eco-pessimism and Islamism) and from without (revisionist powers such as China and Russia).
Following the debate, I came to realise that if you want to understand why intelligent people can disagree so profoundly about what ought to be done in life, it is often insufficient to examine their immediate political or policy arguments. You need to understand the deeper philosophical premises from which those arguments proceed, including their assumptions about the nature of reality, human nature, progress and what constitutes a good society.
I think this gets to the heart of what we mean when we talk about political polarisation and the so-called “culture wars”. People are not simply disagreeing about policies. Nor is it about “comms” or individual personalities.
Increasingly, we are operating from fundamentally different understandings of the world itself. Yet few politicians articulate the philosophical assumptions underpinning their vision of society. Take the nature of reality. Is it an objective order that we must discover and adapt to, or something we can shape through our will and values? These are the underlying questions in many of today’s debates, from transgender identity to energy systems and whether governments can override the laws of supply and demand.
Instead of telling us what they fundamentally believe and why, politicians jump straight to political positioning, tactical messaging and policy announcements, leaving voters totally confused. I think this contributes to the growing fragmentation of our politics, which technologies such as social media are accelerating by reinforcing competing worldviews and making it much harder for people to recognise, let alone understand, the assumptions from which others are reasoning.
svengali retweeted
Anyone who says "we want a death penalty referendum": you are a eunuch.
We are lucky enough to live in a Parliamentary Democracy that can write new laws tomorrow.
But if Rupert & Charlie win a majority, they need extra permission to write a new law on one side of A4?
Get help.
The proposed death penalty referendum is the most egregious example of slopulism in British politics ATM in that it’d burn political capital, waste months, allow oponents to coalesce around the No campaign and be lost badly enough to take the death penalty off the table for fifty years, all while being completely pointless (death penalty legislation could be forced through parliament and public opinion tends to follow legislative changes).
svengali retweeted
Scaling out of the Power Crunch
Historically, only 15% of power generation projects wanting grid connections ever get built, projects demanding large load connections have an even worse attrition rate.
Why?
There are physical, regulatory, and industrial limits. Industry analysts show overlapping hurdles and bottlenecks that often delay or raise the cost of both new generation and hyperscale/AI campuses.
Grouped for clarity…
(many interact and compound)
Site and physical constraints
• Land (size, cost, contiguity)
• Water rights (availability, competing uses)
• Geology (soil, seismic, flooding)
• Noise, air quality, and heat-rejection
• Proximity to high-voltage infrastructure
• Fibre routes and redundancy
• Grid access and headroom at substation
• Interconnection queues
• Transmission lines
• Substation capacity
• Voltage/frequency stability
• Cost allocation / upgrade responsibility
Equipment, manufacturing, and supply chain
• Transformers (all classes)
• Switchgear, circuit breakers, cables, conductors
• Gas turbines
• Recip engines, and other prime movers
• Generators, UPS systems, batteries
• Cooling equipment (chillers, CDUs, etc)
Specialised manufacturing capacity:
• Casting, forging, large lathes/turning of shafts,
• Grain-oriented electrical steel, copper, etc
• Fuel delivery infrastructure (gas pipelines)
Regulatory, permitting, and political
• Environmental permits (air, water, discharge)
• Local zoning, land-use, and building approvals
• Community and political opposition, litigation risk
• NIMBY dynamics
• Residential priority / capacity allocation
• Fuel security, emissions rules
• Behind-the-meter versus grid-tied pathways and associated regulatory treatment
Workforce / construction / financing
• Skilled labour (sparks, welders, pipefitters)
• Construction management, heavy-lift capacity
• Capital costs, financing terms
• Insurance, risk pricing, and contract structures
The number of sites that can satisfy ALL of the above is finite. “Permissible powered land” is much harder than people think it is.
FURTHER… This is much more challenging to do in the West, where individual property rights are strong and empower NIMBYism.
All the highest-quality sites are largely taken, interconnection and equipment timelines dominate schedules, and each successive project tends to face higher costs, longer waits, and more opposition.
Every operator ranks their development portfolio and tests for F.I.D every financial year.
Why is it like this?
It’s because we are doing the build out inside the construction industry, inside civil and construction frameworks.
Consider…
You have a large major capital project, you have 35 supplier stakeholders, each is the top firm in their domain and delivers 95% of their projects on time.
The likelihood of your project being on time is 0.95^35=0.166
That’s a 16% chance of being on time.
You likely have bonds and covenants resting on this 16%. Allocating $900 billion capex into this is scary, but here we are.
The solution is to get out of construction and into manufacturing. In manufacturing you can vertically integrate. You can reduce your counterparty risk by reducing your stakeholder count towards 1
There are 2 escape paths for the compute build-out to get out of construction hell.
One is space, the other is the ocean.
Innovation means breaking out of the box. Landless, residentless flag-jurisdiction is the key to scaling this under Western control. Our enduring freedom now depends on it.
Putting any humility aside for a second… I think Elon and Jeff have space covered, I’m going to do the oceanic path. I think I’m uniquely and best placed to do this, I grew up in a nuclear shipyard town, I’ve work on ~20 offshore platforms, this not my first company, not my first major capital project.
It’s very clear to me how this gets executed.
svengali retweeted
We are developing a drug that opens up the capillaries and fills the body’s tissues with a compound that - according to our partner military labs - destroys all known pathogenic bacteria, all known pathogenic fungi, biofilms, influenza virus as well as viruses of the herpes family.
These are facts.
The FDA recently designed this product a Qualified Infectious Disease Product (QIDP) for all cause pneumonia, giving us FDA Fast Track, and Priority Review.
Good news for the day. ❤️🩹🫡
svengali retweeted
2016 Scotland, hidden from us
45 Confirmed Asylum seekers raped at least 44 girls, with one being raped by 28 of them and another by 23
“Of the 44 underage victims, It's believed one may have been abused by 28 men, with another linked to 23.
55 suspected members of the vile group were identified by officers, with 46 positively identified
All were asylum seekers from the Kurdish, Afghani, Egyptian, Moroccan, Turkish, Pakistani or Iraqi communities”
I wonder what unified them ?
svengali retweeted
Here’s a rather extraordinary discovery: humanity seems to have interrupted the beginning of the next ice age. We thought it might happen in the future, but the evidence suggests it's already happened.
A new study in Science argues that the next major glaciation had already begun roughly 2,000 years ago, before modern warming reversed the trend in the 20th century.
The evidence comes from the Barnes Ice Cap on Baffin Island, the last surviving remnant of the enormous Laurentide Ice Sheet that once covered much of Canada and reached as far south as Illinois.
Because Barnes is frozen directly to its bedrock, advancing ice buries and preserves vegetation beneath it. Researchers radiocarbon dated plants emerging as the ice retreats to reconstruct its history.
They found that after melting to a minimum extent around 3,000 years ago, the ice began expanding again about 2,000 years ago. The researchers interpret this as the earliest stage of the next glacial period.
Left to natural orbital cycles, that cooling would have unfolded extremely slowly, potentially taking tens of thousands of years to rebuild a continent spanning ice sheet.
But around 1960, the trend reversed. Summers became warm enough that Barnes began losing more ice than it gained, despite Northern Hemisphere summer sunlight continuing to slowly decline in a way that should favor renewed glaciation. Greenhouse warming had (thankfully) overwhelmed the natural cooling tendency.
The Barnes ice cap may now disappear entirely within the next few centuries, removing the final remnant of an ice sheet that repeatedly served as the nucleus for much larger glaciations.
There is a remarkable deep time perspective here. For millions of years, orbital cycles have pushed Earth between warmer interglacials and colder glacial periods. According to this study, that ancient cycle had started turning once again.
Then, in the geological equivalent of an instant, humanity pushed hard enough in the opposite direction to stop it.
Just so we're clear, this is a very very good thing.
📸 Geology Sciences
Sources:
1) phys.org/news/2026-10-global…
2) science.org/doi/10.1126/scie…
svengali retweeted
The British Right has a miniscule amount of actual organization.
What has happened across Western Civilization is that a progressive/leftist alliance has essentially super-won/completely curbstomped the right. A number of different forces came together to create this situation. Full spectrum political dominance.
When this happens, people on the right fall into two camps:
- (most people) Fake right. Leftism with a speed limit. Based Kemi and Zia campaigning to reduce government spending by 0.1% and arrest at least some repeat violent offenders.
- (a smaller group) Real right. British Empire/Rhodes reels, but done from people's bedrooms.
The first step to getting out of this mess is realizing that you are in it.
svengali retweeted
The Test Act wasn’t repealed because Britain saw the light about toleration, but because Catholics were no longer a political threat
Should any religious minority in the UK ever seem to be prioritising the interests of co-religionists over the country as a whole, we should not hesitate to reinstate a Test Act
svengali retweeted
There’s a thing called “cocktail eyes” - when you’re talking to someone and they’re already scanning the room for someone more important.
A lot of our politicians have cocktail eyes about the job itself. And we're the ones they're ignoring.
Local councillors who bang on about Palestine are treating their actual role (bins, hedges, planning, antisocial behaviour - the local good) as beneath them. National politicians who treat e.g. Net Zero as a chance to be “world leaders” are doing the same thing at a bigger scale: chasing status and smugness instead of the national good (energy abundance and security).
In both cases they need to put their eyes back in the room and focus on the people they are meant to serve. As Collingwood says, that alone would radically alter our country.
Read all of this. It is more important than you think. Wayne Dixon is a councillor in Leeds. He doesn't get involved in foreign policy issues. No standing with Ukraine or Palestine or Israel or wherever. He doesn't even get involved much in national issues. He just focusses, laser like, on doing small things that make the lives of his local constituents better. Cleaning up footpaths covered in wet leaves. Harassing the local authorities until they fix potholes. Cleaning up graffiti. Trimming hedges so they look neat and tidy. Liaising with the police to deal with antisocial behaviour. Ensuing that the local schools have enough places for every local who wants to send their kids there. Getting bus stops put in the right place when roads are re-laid or new roads are built. Making sure that green spaces where kids play football are not flogged off. Ensuring that important community groups and support networks are helped as much as they can be.
It is hyper local politics. It is the work that only somebody with high energy and who knows the local area can do. If we had 20,000 Wayne Dixons, the cumulative transformation in the entire country would be shocking over ten years. Any sports fan knows that marginal gains have huge cumulative effects when achieved consistently over a period of time (see the Chicago Bulls and Team Sky). Same with countries. 150,000 little, easy, cheap things over 10 years and you have almost a new country. This is achievable right now, with no changes in legislation or 'new elite'.
More politics should be about exactly this: putting right the 20 streets closest to where you live and making the lives of people who live there better. Remember: there are black and white pictures of a young Lee Kwan Yew sweeping the streets of Singapore. That's where he started his politics. Of course we need to get the big things right -- and Britain is facing at least three existential problems that only central government can address. Yet simultaneously, we also need this.
svengali retweeted
Investigating group differences isn’t a central scientific issue except in terms of:
1) education and academic achievement (e.g., assuming all group differences in test scores are caused by unequal schooling)
2) criminal justice and public safety (e.g., misdiagnosing the causes of disparities in offending, which mostly means libelling white people for “systemic racism”)
3) medicine and public health (e.g., overlooking population differences in genetic disease susceptibility and behavior)
4) immigration and integration (e.g., overestimating how quickly disparities in criminality, educational outcomes, labour-market participation or welfare-dependency will disappear)
5) employment and recruitment (e.g., treating every disparity in occupational representation as proof of discrimination, which again mostly means libelling white people for “systemic racism”)
6) statistics and causal inference (e.g., suggesting that suspensions cause higher rates of black offending in US schools)
7) welfare policy and public expenditure (e.g., repeatedly funding environmentalist interventions without evaluating their effectiveness)
…and so on. But apart from that, it’s not important at all.
