May 9, 2026

AS CONFIRMED BY PHYSICS:

May 9, 2026

Why Dr. Johnson Kicked a Stone After Hearing Berkeley’s Argument (Vanja Subotic, 5/07/26, The Collector)

Berkeley’s key idea, the one that so enraged Dr. Johnson, is neatly summed up in his neat Latin phrase: Esse est percipi (to be is to be perceived). He argues that for anything to exist, it must be perceived by someone. Put simply, an object that no one is aware of through their senses simply cannot exist. […]

Something often omitted in the retelling of this philosophical anecdote is that, according to Boswell, Johnson kicked the stone more out of frustration than demonstration. Both he and Johnson considered Berkeley’s ideas to be at odds with common sense. But try as hard as they could, neither of them could come up with a way of disproving Berkeley’s arguments. They were absolutely convinced that Berkeley was wrong and annoyed that they could not vindicate common sense.

No one can.

Identitarianism

MOURNING THE BANTUSTANS:

May 9, 2026

How Minority Districts Fueled the G.O.P.’s Southern Ascendancy in Congress (Carl Hulse, 5/08/26, NY Times)

The G.O.P. may find it more difficult to win in more diverse districts of the kind that existed before the reshuffling of maps prompted by the Voting Rights Act. […]

In the late 1980s, Republicans had been deep in the House minority for nearly 40 years. But growing dissatisfaction with the Democratic Party had begun moving white Southern conservatives into the Republican ranks, as illustrated by high-profile party switches in Washington. Then the redistricting initiated under a series of court decisions aimed at fostering more minority representation provided yet another opening that might have seemed counterintuitive at first glance.

Architects of the maps realized that if they could maximize Black and Hispanic representation in the new districts, they would simultaneously dilute Democratic strength in surrounding jurisdictions where coalitions of white and Black voters had elected white Democrats for decades. The shift would ultimately create dozens of openings for Republican candidates in what had formerly been known as Democrats’ “Solid South.”

Groups bankrolled by wealthy conservatives joined with liberal organizations to school minority advocacy groups in state capitals and in Washington about how to shape new districts to meet court tests and best guarantee the election of minority representatives for minority communities — an outcome that many on the left argued was long overdue. Republican groups even provided free access to expensive computer software that could craft the new districts. Democrats eagerly accepted the help.

Some civil rights figures such as Representative John Lewis, the Georgia Democrat, warned at the time that the new maps could empower Republicans by weakening the partnership of progressive white and Black voters in the South. But others said the new districts were the only way to overcome centuries of institutional discrimination against minorities in the region.

“Gerrymandering was done to keep Black folks out,” Mr. Clyburn said. “If you gerrymander to keep them out, you’ve got to gerrymander to bring them in.”

It’s not racism when you ghettoize the vote?

Energy

THE FUTURE ALWAYS HAPPENS FASTER THAN YOU EXPECT:

May 9, 2026

Trump Is Losing His War on Renewables: This is the second war Trump is losing. Last year solar and wind power accounted for 99 percent of the growth in world electricity supply, while generation using fossil fuels declined. (Paul Krugman , 5/08/26, NY Times)

The global energy transition — the shift from fossil fuels to electrotech, which uses solar, wind and batteries to power an electrified economy — is accelerating. It’s now clear that the closure of the Strait of Hormuz marks an inflection point: the global green energy curve, which was already on a rapidly rising trajectory, has suddenly become even steeper. “Investors,” reports the Financial Times, “are piling into clean energy funds.”

This acceleration isn’t just a consequence of soaring fossil fuel prices. It is also the result of the worldwide realization that, with the end of Pax Americana, depending on imported hydrocarbons is a risk not worth taking. The United States cannot be relied on to keep sea lanes open when cheap drones can take out an oil tanker or a major pipeline. Even relying on oil and gas from America itself is dangerous, since one never knows when an erratic U.S. government – now under the control of a twice-elected malignant narcissist — will try to use energy as a tool of coercion.

Despite the perversity of its causes, the current acceleration of electrotech is overwhelmingly positive for the world as a whole. It will slow climate change and reduce pollution. It will diminish the power of anti-democratic petrostates and limit the vulnerability of the world economy to disruptions at choke points like Hormuz. It will democratize access to cheap energy sources in places like Africa.

There is another positive consequence of the clean energy boom: the diminishment of the carbon coalition — the interest groups and ideologues who hate renewable energy and want the world to keep burning fossil fuels.

Economics trumps ideology.

Just So Stories

SILLINESS EVOLVES:

May 9, 2026

If wings came before flight, what were they for? (Lily Burton, 5/08/26, Science News)

In the experiments, Jablonski, now at the Museum and Institute of Zoology of the Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw, and his colleagues focused on small, feathered dinosaurs called pennaraptorans. The animals’ “protowings” were unlikely to have supported flight, says Minyoung Son, a vertebrate paleontologist at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis.

The surface area of the wings, he says, would have been too small to create the aerodynamic force needed to lift pennaraptorans off the ground, and the ranges of their wing joints would also have limited their movements. Plus, Son says, feathers need to have an asymmetrical shape to be aerodynamic, and based on the fossil record, these dinosaurs “don’t have the aerodynamic feathers yet.”

AS CONFIRMED BY PHYSICS:

MOURNING THE BANTUSTANS:

THE FUTURE ALWAYS HAPPENS FASTER THAN YOU EXPECT:

SILLINESS EVOLVES:

You Missed

DONALD WHO?:

ALL SCIENCE LEADS BACK TO FAITH:

THE WAGES OF iDENTITARIANISM:

ALWAYS BET ON THE dEEP sTATE: